Learning Node.js Development

The node_modules folder

Now that you know how to use a third-party module, there is one more thing I want to discuss. That is the node_modules folder in general. When you take your Node project and you put it on GitHub, or you're copying it around or sending it to a friend, the node_modules folder really shouldn't be taken with you.

The node_modules folder contains generated code. This is not code you've written and you should never make any updates to the files inside Node modules because there's a pretty good chance they'll get overwritten next time you install some modules.

In our case, we've already defined the modules and the versions inside package.json as shown in the following code because we used that handy save flag:

{ "name": "notes-node", ...