What are those reasons that people install Node.js on PC, and can a Node.js website be developed without installing Node.js on PC, if yes, what are the disadvantages? Thanks

CodePudding user response：

There can be many reasons, but some common ones:

• When developing for any language, you'll need to be able to run and test your code, and running it locally makes it easier to do so.
• Additionally, although you can use remote debugging, debugging is faster and easier to set up locally.
• Many of the tools used by web developers are also developed in JavaScript and to run those locally, an engine capable of doing so is required. It makes sense that these tools are developed in JavaScript, not just because their primary user group will be able to understand and extend their code, but also because many of these tools need to be able to perform tasks and integrate with components that require something like a JavaScript engine to begin with.
• In many situations, running a local environment on your development system will be cheaper and easier to maintain than having a separate test server; and you don't want to run your untested code on a production server.

Not directly related, but npm and Node.js have many uses beyond serving as a back-end to JavaScript-driven websites. Many people that have Node.js installed have nothing to do with web development, but have it for one of the many other reasons.

To answer your 2nd question: "can a Node.js website be developed without installing Node.js on PC?" Yes, but I can see very little reason to want to do so, unless you must. The advantage might be that you can avoid having a complicated piece of software with a large footprint and possibly some security concerns on your development machine. But the disadvantages for the average developer likely far outweigh that - more so if you just sandbox the entire development environment in case security is your main concern.

CodePudding user response：

If you are writing everything from scratch, you don't need a package manager, but there is so much great stuff out there that you can use rather than writing it yourself! If you want to use it, you need a package manager that allows you to download (an optionally specific version of) specific packages, which may use packages themselves, and YOUR source code repository doesn't need to store a copy of every package you use, and every package used by the packages you use, because, as long as your source code specifies which packages it uses in a way your package manager understands, all you need to do is specify a manifest of (an optionally specific version of) specific packages your code uses directly.

"NPM" is one such package manager. "bower" is another but that uses NPM under the hood. Maven is a package manager I've seen in Java projects, and NuGet for MS projects, but for JavaScript projects it's usually NPM. And NPM uses node.