Node.js cookbook

Your API key is sitting in plain text at the top of a file you're about to push to GitHub.

The file-reading code you wrote works, but it's nested three callbacks deep and hard to follow.

You want your script to accept --output and --verbose, so you start writing your own loop over process.argv.

Every static-file tutorial reaches for Express before you've even seen what the http module does on its own.

You want to prove your code works before you touch it again, but adding a testing framework feels like a whole project on its own.

The server was running fine, then it just stopped, and the only clue in the logs is a stack trace nobody wrote.

You're storing user passwords and you know plain text is wrong, but installing bcrypt for a side project feels heavy.

The log file you need to search through is bigger than the memory your script is allowed to use.

console.log is scattered through six files and you still can't tell which branch the code actually takes.

You need to call a command-line tool from your script, and the fastest way to do it happens to be the least safe one.

One endpoint that resizes an image is making every other request on the server wait its turn.

Every time you redeploy, a handful of requests get cut off mid-response.

Memory keeps climbing in a service that's been running for days, and restarting it is starting to feel like the actual fix.