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WATS 3020: Cowsay Hello World

Walkthrough Video

Cowsay Hello World

JavaScript was created to be run in the browser, but in 2009, the JavaScript engine in Chrome was extracted and used to create a command line program that can execute JavaScript and is known as node.js. A software registry named npm was created to hold and manage dependencies. When you install node, you also get npm which is a program used to manage downloading code from npmjs.org.

In this assignment you'll get experience hooking up node modules to a JavaScript file and hooking up a JavaScript file to an HTML file.

We like to do a Hello World project when we're learning a new language. Being able to say "hello world" means that you are able to give your program some I/O capabilities, that is your program can "talk". In this exercise you'll see JavaScript "talk" in two very different ways: 1) through a command line interface with node and 2) through a web/gui interface via an HTML file.

Learn JavaScript in the Browser or With Node?

JavaScript is the only language that runs in the browser. The benefit of learning to run JavaScript using node it that you can run code in a way that more approximates how you would run code with other scripting languages like Python. With node, we don't need to setup the constructs of HTML or run a server to execute JavaScript.

Installing node and npm

See these instructions for installing node before you begin: Node install.
When you install node, you get it's package manager npm (Node Package Manager) along with it. Node packages are chunks of JavaScript made available through modules that get downloaded from npmjs.org. When you study JavaScript Frameworks, you'll work more intensively with npm modules. In this assignment we introduce these resources as we'll be using node to learn to program JavaScript in several tutorial assignments.

Once node and npm are installed, you can run npm install from the command line in the root of this project to import the necessary libraries to access the cowsay library from the code that node will execute.

Project Resources

It might be helpful to review some additional resources as you work through this project:

Basic Requirements

In order to successfully complete this exercise, you must find and complete the TODOs in the code:

  • Fork this repository and clone to your local projects directory
  • Run npm install in the root of this project
  • Use script tag in html to make js/main.js available to index.html.
<script src="js/main.js"></script>
  • Use CommonJS require to make cowsay and getargs modules available to index.js.
const cowsay = require("./node_modules/cowsay");
const getargs = require("./modules/get-args")
  • Run index.html in the browser and get the cow to say "hello world".
  • Run index.js in the command line and get the cow to say "hello world".
  • Take screenshots of the browser and CLI output and put them in the screenshots directory.
  • Push your source code to your master branch.
  • Deploy your site to master branch.
  • Turn in 2 URLs: 1 to your code and 1 to the deployed code

Turn in assignment

Push your code to the forked repository in your account.

  • Your code screenshots directory should contain 2 images - one of the browser cow saying "hello world" and one of the command line cow saying "hello world" Turn in 2 URL's on Canvas which should be of the format:
  • https://github.com/{account name}/{repo name}
  • https://{account name}.github.com/{repo name}

Stretch Goals

If you want to push this project further, you can try some of the following:

  • Enhance the styling of the html page.
  • Change the way the cows looks in the html page
  • Change the eyes and tail of the cow in the node output