Best NodeJS Projects for Beginners

If you have decided to build your career in NodeJS development, we have gathered a list of nodeJS projects for beginners and all node enthusiasts to build highly scalable web applications.

These best nodeJS projects for beginners will help you gain knowledge about core node concepts, train your skill level, build a superb work portfolio, and get hired for your dream job.

When you start building your first projects, it’s highly recommended for beginners in coding to create a repository for each of your projects so you will be able to learn git and show your coding expertise to future employers.

Let’s dig into our top NodeJS projects for beginners list.

What is NodeJS?

NodeJS is a runtime environment that executes Javascript code out of the browser, and it’s commonly used to create back-end. NodeJS is often used with additional frameworks like Express or Nest.js. that can be used in some cases and make the development process much easier and faster.

TOP NodeJS Frameworks to use

Knowledge about these frameworks will be greatly advantageous for your future projects. So start focusing on learning these as well.

Express.js  – is one of the most popular NodeJS frameworks. Express.js is known as fast, flexible, and minimalistic. It’s suitable for building web and mobile applications.

Nest.js – is another NodeJS framework that is great for developing progressive server-side applications, the code in Nest.js is written in Typescript.

Sequelize – it’s a generator framework, that helps us to work with NodeJS and databases. It supports MySQL, PostgreSQL, MariaDB, and some more.

Socket.io – it’s a special type of framework, as it focuses on building real-time apps like chats.

Besides the Javascript knowledge to work with NodeJS, you need to understand how and why databases are used on backend, and how to build an API, no matter if you want to build REST or GraphQL.

NodeJS Projects Ideas for Beginners

1. Portfolio App

For all you beginners in programming, creating a portfolio app as your initial nodejs projects for beginners will be an apt idea. Here, you can first concentrate on the outlook of the application which means how it looks and how are the sample projects working out. This app can reveal your personal sense of style as well.

There are multiple elements you can use to give a good experience to user, like presenting the application and the output with a good appearance.

The next thing you have to work on is the architecture of the whole project. It includes the code you are writing to make a light-weight and easy to use application. Also, you have to first define separate routes for each project.

Node.js has different set of controllers for each route to manage the views. If you have the same code for the header and footer then you don’t have to repeat them which come as a benefit for the programmers.

2. Books Directory

This one is often considered as the most basic project you can create using Node.js and Express.js or Nest.js is a simple REST API. For this you can build a book directory, where you would need to create endpoints, using the 4 most basic methods: GET, POST, PUT and DELETE.

You’d use GET for getting all books or only 1 book by id. With the POST, you can add a new book to the list, and need PUT method for updating the existing book. It’s evident that with the DELETE method, you can remove the book from the list.

For this kind of application, you don’t have to use the database, and for the first app, you can start with data collected as a JSON file.

3. Chat App

Another basic nodejs projects for beginners, is a chat application, where the programmer gets a fair idea of working with real-time systems.

Firstly, you have to separate the application in 2 parts i.e.- the client part and the server part. With the help of web socket you and the client can directly share data at any time. This feature is often seen as a virtual handshake.

The process starts with the client sending regular HTTP request to the server. This particular application is very easy to code with the knowledge of web sockets and socket.io.

You can enhance your application by 

1. Keeping a record of all conversations.
2. Online/offline labels.
3. Take references from the features of whatsapp.
4. A registration system for one on one chats.

4. Video Streaming Platform

This nodejs projects for beginners project, is tremendously eye-catching and could easily help you get your dream job, if you learn all the basics right.

You have to take care of dividing the video content for the chunks to not send all to the frontend at once. Also, you would need to write some HTML5 to create a video player, and some Javascript on frontend to handle player buttons.

5. Web Security

This is one of the most interesting projects a novice programmer should work upon if he/ she is looking to build a career in Node development.

You can create a spoof login page like Facebook’s to know the passwords of your family and friends( can be executed if you are able to host it on your LAN).

Things are more interesting when you can host it on the web, there you can peak into almost anyone’s password.

6. Email Sender

The next idea for nodejs projects for beginners is an email sender app. While building this project, the beginners can learn how to send and schedule emails in NodeJS. Additionally, you can add a front-end and easily create emails with HTML.

For ease of sending emails, you could use the Nodemailer plugin, which is easy and very well documented.

7. Gaming

For all the gaming lover programmers, this seems to be a perfect way to have fun with work. Build a gaming app of your choice, learn basic programming skills and be a entrepreneur as well by selling your app on google play store!

To start with, start coding on NodeJS by using web sockets to provide a real time conversation between the clients and the server. Also, start with making an applet which collects statistics from multiple clients and put it on a single platform.

For larger applications, you can put more effort into CSS stylesheet and have more interface elements. Try to keep all the logic to the server side so the client only has to give input to render the information from the server’s end.

8. To-Do list

Creating a to-do list is a much easier way to understand the basic concepts of programming. Create an empty page where the user can record all the task they have to complete during the day.

And, Store the new and completed tasks in a different array. For this application put in very minimal CSS styles with a neat appearance.

To get your application running use express framework. Express is one of the minimalist frameworks which will be very easy to work with a server like node.js.

9. Basic Users System

Another application for nodejs projects for beginners is a “Basic User System”. It’s a very basic project, but it will help you to practice useful skills because the user is a part of almost every application.

Major learning of this application:  – how to set up the database and do migrations, how to create a new user by the registration, how to build login endpoint,  how to authenticate user,  how to get the user’s data.

In the case of registration and login, you should generate a JWT token for the user that will be returned from the API. Besides that, remember to hash the password before you save it in the database.

In Conclusion

In this article, we have gathered few basic nodeJS projects for beginners, which the learners can practice to enhance their Node JS skills and build a coding portfolio.

I hope you’ll find these ideas useful to place yourself at a better position in coding with nodejs. If you have more suggestions/ ideas about nodejs projects for beginners, please share in the comment section below!

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