Node.js

Nginx, pronounced "engine X", is a fast and lightweight web server, that can be used to serve static files, but is often used as a reverse proxy. It has some very nice features like load balancing and rate limiting. We'll cover some common use cases like serving files, creating a directory listing, reverse proxying to pass incoming traffic to a local web server, adding SSL encryption, and how to require https and www on your site. This guide is for someone who needs a quick reference to setting up a simple nginx server. For the latest documentation always check out the official website https://www.nginx.com/ and the source mirror at https://github.com/nginx/nginx.

Let's Encrypt is "a free, automated, and open Certificate Authority." They provide free signed certificates as a trusted certificate authority. This tutorial walks through the process of installing certbot and requesting new certificates and renewing existing ones wit Let's Encrypt. If you are just looking to generate your own quick self-signed certificates, check out my tutorial on creating self-signed SSL certificates with OpenSSL.

CoffeeScript is an evolution of JavaScript. It actually compiles down to optimized JavaScript. It feels a lot like Python because of the significant whitespace, and lack of semi-colon line endings and curly braces. The syntax is a lot sparser than JavaScript which lends to its readability and simplicity. CoffeeScript can be run as an interpreter or a compiler. You can write plugins for the GitHub Atom Editor using CoffeeScript. The compiled JavaScript can be used for a web application or for command line applications run by Node.js.

There is a wget package available for Node.js that makes it really easy to integrate the convenience of wget in to a Node.js program. It is useful for downloading a file from any number of protocols. This example shows you how to download a file using wget in Node.js

Node.js is the server side version of JavaScript. Since it is not limited by the web browser, we can access files on the file system. Here are several code snippets that demonstrate how to read, write, move, delete, change ownership, change permission, check if exists, and get statistics file size, timestamps, and ownership for files.

These code snippets demonstrate how to access command line arguments for a Node.js program.

jQuery provide a convenient way to access elements using CSS selectors. Node.js has a package called Cheerio that allows us to make jQuery style code. The Request module can be used in tandem to provide the ability to perform an HTTP GET to fetch remote HTML documents. That is useful for web scraping.

Node.js is, according to their website, "a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices." It is essentially a javascript interpreter for the command line. With Node.js, you can write scripts in JavaScript just like you would with PHP and Python.