Appendix A. Modules in Node.js
This appendix covers things you need to know about modules and Node.js to use both effectively in your Grunt builds. Node.js is a platform built on top of the V8 JavaScript engine, the same engine that makes JavaScript in Google Chrome a reality. Grunt, the build tool you use in this book, runs on Node. Node is single threaded, as all JavaScript is.
Node comes with a nice little companion command-line interface (CLI) utility called npm, which is used to fetch and install packages from the node-packaged modules registry. Throughout the book, you’ll learn how to use the npm tool as needed. Let’s install Node.js first, since npm comes bundled with it!
You have a few options for installing Node. If you’re the point-and-click type, then you might want to head over to their website, http://nodejs.org, and click on the big green Install button. Once the binaries are downloaded, unpack them if needed, and then double-click to install them. That’s it.
If you prefer to install things in your terminal, consider nvm, a user-created Node version manager. To install nvm, you can type the following line into your terminal: