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In this lab, we're going to test exports and imports. Along the way, we're going to learn about installing packages from npm, and we'll even learn a bit about a technique called "function currying."

To start, run npm test. You should see an error that tests could not run, and a warning that node_modules is missing. Before we talk about how to resolve those issues, let's talk about this weird file called package.json and the npm test command.

Node.js packages typically come with a package.json file. This file tells Node about the module that it contains, including (at minimum) the module's name and version.

The npm command line utility provides a handy function for initializing a basic package.json: npm init. This command will walk you through configuring your package, and, when it's finished, it will write a package.json to the current directory.

The package.json also keeps track of your project's dependencies and devDependencies. npm uses semantic versioning to keep our packages up to date.

We can install packages from npm using npm install. (You might see some similarities with gem install — they're analogous.) Let's install one of the packages that this lab needs:

npm install mocha

npm will fetch the mocha package from the remote repository, and add it (and its dependencies) to a node_modules folder in the current directory. Now if we run npm test, we should get a helpful-ish error.

But we have node_modules in our .gitignore (which is a convention in the Node.js community and one that we'll usually try to follow), so how do we make sure that we don't have to manually install our dependencies every time we clone this repo?

The answer is --save and --save-dev, two options that are available to npm install. Typically, you'll want to npm install --save packages that you'll need in production, and npm install --save-dev packages that you'll only need in development (like testing packages, linters, etc.). So if we run

npm install mocha --save-dev

and check our package.json, we should see an entry for mocha under devDependencies. Now when we clone the package, we can just run a bare npm install from the root of the package to install all if its dependencies in one go.

Now we can get back to npm test. If you run npm, you should see a note about some commands that npm runs by default. The test command looks for a test entry in a package.json's scripts section — in this lab's scripts, you can see "test": "mocha". This entry tells npm test to look for the mocha command — it will look first in ./node_modules/.bin, but then it will look for a global command. In this case, we'll find ./node_modules/.bin/mocha, so we'll just use that. And voilà, our tests run!

Take a look at ./lib/greet.js and ./test/greet_test.js. Your job is to make the tests pass. You'll need to export the correct functionality from ./lib/greet.js, and you'll need to make sure that all dependencies are satisfied.

We'll also check that your dependencies are set up well — that is, that the correct dependencies are in devDependencies and the others are in dependencies in your package.json.

This lab tests importing and exporting by testing that greet.js provides a curried version of a greeting function.

As the Wikipedia article above notes, "currying is the technique of translating the evaluation of a function that takes multiple arguments (or a tuple of arguments) into evaluating a sequence of functions, each with a single argument." In JavaScript, it means taking a function like this:

function curryUp(a, b, c) {
  return a + b + c;
}

const a = 1;
const b = 2;
const c = 3;

curryUp(a, b, c);

into something that can be called like this

const applyA = curryUp(a);
const applyB = applyA(b);
const applyC = applyB(c);

// alternatively:

const allApplied = curryUp(a)(b)(c);

The library (hint hint!) lodash takes care of transforming the function for us. You'll just need to make sure that greet.js can import lodash (conventionally, we assign lodash to _) and that it exports the curried version of the greet() function.

• package.json: https://docs.npmjs.com/getting-started/using-a-package.json
• semantic versioning
• currying