Modern Full-Stack Development

 Process
Unlike the other modules, this one is a global, which means it is always available, and 
there is no need to import anything. You simply call methods on the intrinsic process 
reference or access its properties.
That, of course, is good to know, but what does this module do for us? Well, the 
answer is quite a lot! In short, it allows you to retrieve information and control the 
current Node process. Here are just a few of the items it offers:
•  process.abort() – This method aborts the Node process, ending 
your program. However, that unceremoniously kills the process, so 
what you likely want to use is process.exit() instead, to which you 
can pass an exit code to return to the process that started Node.
•  process.version – This contains the version of Node itself.
•  process.uptime() – How long has the Node process been running 
for? This method will tell you!
•  process.mainModule – Here, you can find the name of the .js file 
that was launched by Node. Note that Node also provides a handful 
of global variables that contain important information like this, 
__filename being the equivalent to this property (they generally all 
start with two underscores like that). For reference, __dirname will 
provide the name of the directory where the script was launched 
from, which tends to be an often-needed piece of information.
•  process.env – This contains an object whose keys are user 
environment variables.
There’s quite a bit more that the process module offers, but in my experience, much 
beyond these is a bit more unusual to use, so I’ll leave its exploration as an exercise for 
the reader.
Chapter 2   a Few More words: advanCed node and npM

---

37