This tells express that we are using pug as our template engine.Clean and organize HTML, that’s what we as Front-end Developers always aim for. I’ve already included the pug package in our project dependencies so we can go ahead and use it in express.Īdd the following code to your server.js file below the app variable. I’ll be using Pug here because I’m comfortable with the syntax but you can do the tutorial in another templating engine if you wish. Pug, Mustache, and EJS are some of the most popular ones. There are several template engines you can use with Express. We can author the HTML files by hand and specify what file to send to the browser once a GET request hits a route, but it’s almost always better to use a template engine to generate HTML files on the fly.Ī template engine allows you to define templates for your application and replace the variables in the template with actual values at runtime while transforming the template to an actual HTML file which is then sent to the client.

Instead of just sending text to the browser when someone hits a route, we can send some HTML as most websites do.

Now the web server will be restarted automatically everytime you make a change. You can view the version of Node and npm you have installed by running the following commands in your terminal:Īpp. The versions I used while building this project are as follows: You can search the web for instructions on how to install Node.js and npm for your preferred platform or visit the Node.js website ( npm comes with Node). Before you continue though, you need to have Node.js and npm installed. If you know JavaScript but you have never done any server-side programming before, this tutorial for you. I believe this tutorial will be particularly helpful if you already have some experience with JavaScript on the frontend. I decided to write this introductory tutorial for anyone who is interested in learning Node after realising that it’s not so easy to read the documentation and figure out how to go about building stuff with Node. Recently, I decided to learn Node.js properly and do some server-side programming as well. Updated on JanuHow to Build Your First Node.js Website with Express and Pugįor most of my career as a Web Developer, I worked on the frontend of websites and applications consuming APIs made by other people.

Send data to pug template express