DevLog 1-3

Pacis Nkubito: DEVLOG 1-3

Node.js and Cron Jobs

This week I learned how to setup a Node.js environment and setup a simple project.

Node installation

First, I installed the latest version of Node.js (v25.4.0) from the official website. After installation, I verified the installation by running node -v and npm -v in the terminal.

Running a Node program

Next, I run a simple script to test my Node.js environment:

Simple JavaScript Script

let greeting = 'Hello, from Node';
console.log(greeting);

Then I run the script using the command node script.js, and it printed “Hello, from Node” in the terminal.

Node Package Manager

Then I learned about NPM which is Node Package Manager in full. This is a tool that helps manage libraries for Node.js projects. I initialized my project using npm init -y, which created a package.json file.

Nodemon

Then I learned about nodemon, which is basically a tool that helps to automatically restart the application when file changes are detected. I installed it using npm install nodemon --save-dev.

Then I learned how we can make node.js development easier by using scripts inside package.json. This is handy especially when you have multiple commands or parameters to run.

Server Scripts

{
    "scripts": {
        "start": "nodemon index.js",
        "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
    }
}

With this I can start our project using npm start.

Cron Jobs

Then I learned about cron jobs and how to schedule them. In node.js we can use a package called node-cron. I installed it using npm install node-cron.

With this we can create a task to run every 10 minutes using the cron expression 0 */10 * * * *.

Cron Jobs in Javascript

var job = new CronJob(
  '0 */10 * * * *',
  function() {
    console.log('The local time is: '+ new Date().toLocaleString());
  },
  null, true, 'America/New_York'
);

This task will print the local time every 10 minutes.

Publishing to Github

Finally, I published my code on Github and the repository can be found here.