Initialization of an application

The first step we'll take inside of the Terminal is that we'll make a directory to store all of these files. We'll navigate from our home directory to the desktop using the cd Desktop command:

cd Desktop

Then, we'll make a folder to store all of the lesson files for this project.

Now, we'll make that folder using the mkdir command, which is the short form for make directory. Let's call the folder notes-node, as shown in the following code:

mkdir notes-node

We'll make a note app in Node so that notes-node seems appropriate. Then we'll cd into notes-node, and we can get started playing around with some of the built-in modules:

cd notes-node

These modules are built in, so there's no need to install anything in Terminal. We can simply require them right inside of our Node files.

The next step in the process is to open up that directory inside the Atom text editor. So open up the directory we just created on the Desktop, and you will find it there, as shown in the following screenshot:

Now, we will need to make a file, and we'll put that file in the root of the project:

We'll call this file app.js, and this is where our application will start:

We will be writing other files that get used throughout the app, but this is the only file we'll ever be running from Terminal. This is the initialization file for our application.