Getting Started with Deno 🦕

— 3 minute read

Today, we'll be covering getting started with Deno! Deno is a JavaScript server language like node.js but built in Typescript. It's designed to improve the shortcomings of node.js.

It's been quite hyped over the last couple months, and even when writing this article, I have zero experience with it, so this guide is also my guide.

What is TypeScript?

As mentioned, TypeScript is a superset of JavaScript. TypeScript is a strongly typed language, meaning types must be defined when declaring variables. This makes it more strict and easier to spot errors and faults.

Setting up Deno

To get started, we need to install Deno locally first.

If you are on Linux/Mac run the following command:

curl -fsSL https://deno.land/x/install/install.sh | sh

If you're on Windows:

iwr https://deno.land/x/install/install.ps1 -useb | iex

Note: You can find your install package on the Deno website

You can verify the installation by running:

deno --help

Our First Deno Application

So let's start by creating our first Deno application.

Create a new folder and our starting file server.ts

mkdir deno && cd deno

Let's start adding lines to our server.ts file

import {serve} from 'https://deno.land/std@0.63.0/http/server.ts';

This tells our server to import the serve module from a URL; in node.js we would have to use npm install first!

Now we are going to create a new Deno server:

const server = serve({port: 1337});

We are starting our server on port 1337.

Sending a response to the browser

for await (const req of server) {
  req.respond({body: 'Hello Deno!!'});
}

So this is a bit different then what we see in node.js. We loop through each incoming request, and for each request, we are returning a body!

Running Our Deno Server

To run our deno server, we can run the following command in our terminal.

deno run --allow-net server.ts

Now we can open our browser and go to localhost:1337. We should now see our body!

Awesome, getting started was really quick and easy!

You can download my starter project on GitHub

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