Why isn't Node included as a dependency for Express?

Question

I am learning Express and I see that per the docs it contains some of the same functionality as Node. For example, request and response are said to be the exact same as Node.

See here: https://expressjs.com/en/starter/hello-world.html

If Node is not included as a dependency can I assume that they are using a fork from the Node project?

No mention of Node here in the package.json

  "dependencies": {
    "body-parser": "^1.18.2",
    "config": "^1.29.4",
    ...  snip
    "style-loader": "^0.19.1",
    "yarn": "^1.5.1"
  },

Node isn't a package you install as a dependency of Express. It's the runtime that provides the environment and the javascript engine. — Mark, Dec 23 '18 at 03:12

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Dec 23 '18 at 03:15

Node isn't an NPM package, it's the thing that runs Node modules, so it wouldn't be listed under package dependencies.

Specific versions of Node could be listed under the engines key, if the package chooses to specify required Node versions to run it. This is optional information however.

score 1 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 23 '18 at 03:18

1

I think the confusion comes from many developers interchangeably calling many apps and APIs "Node Application" or "Express Application".

I believe this is due to overwhelming amount of NodeJS server applications that use express as a package.

answered Dec 23 '18 at 03:18

Alan Negrete

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score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Dec 23 '18 at 03:13

Express is a node.js package, which you probably installed using npm (node package manager). See their getting started: installation (https://expressjs.com/en/starter/installing.html) which installs express through npm. Node.js is an environment for server side javascript, and express is library for node.js.

Why isn't Node included as a dependency for Express?

3 Answers3