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Node.js

A JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 engine.

Node.js runs JavaScript outside the browser, with an event-loop runtime built around V8 and a non-blocking I/O API that maps to the operating system's epoll/kqueue/IOCP primitives. The npm package manager and registry, which ships alongside Node.js, opened JavaScript to server-side and command-line use; npm now hosts millions of packages and is the largest package registry of any programming language ecosystem.

Node.js has reshaped the web-tooling landscape: most modern bundlers, linters, formatters, transpilers, and frameworks ship as npm packages and run on Node. Even projects in other languages frequently include a node_modules tree because of JavaScript-based build tooling.

Ryan Dahl created Node.js in 2009 while at Joyent. Joyent transferred stewardship to the Node.js Foundation in 2015, which in 2019 merged with the JS Foundation to form the OpenJS Foundation. Long Term Support (LTS) versions are maintained for 30 months from release; production deployments typically target the most recent LTS.

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install nodejs npm
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install nodejs npm
Arch:          sudo pacman -S nodejs npm
macOS:         brew install node
Or use nvm to manage multiple Node versions.