HAP holding a wooden toolbox filled with hammer, pliers, and other tools

How Sites Get Built

HAP's Learning Lab

Every modern website is built. Somewhere between the files a developer edits and the page that arrives in a browser, a program ran. A single command runs that program. This lab is about what the program is and why it exists.

Nine pages covering what Node is, what npm is and is not, what node_modules really contains, why opening an HTML file directly stops working eventually, what a port number is, and where static site generators fit.

No project to hand in here. This is the reading that makes the projects make sense. 🟠

What This Lab Covers

What the commands are doing

Plenty of instructions will tell you to run npm init and then npm install. This lab is about what those two commands did, what they left on your disk, and why anyone designed it that way.

Not tied to an assignment

Nothing here belongs to a particular project. The commands are the real ones you will meet, so they should look familiar when they show up in one.

Four kinds of page

Some pages explain, one walks through a hands-on exercise, and two are lookup tables. Each page says at the top which kind it is, so you know what you are getting into.

Where it stops

This lab covers four things: a runtime, a package manager, a manifest, and a local server. Static site generators get an introduction here and a lab of their own.

The Pages, In Order

How To Use This

Pages one through four form a sequence and work best when read in order. After that, the reference pages are there to return to, and the last three stand alone.

If you are here because something specific broke, the command set ends with a list of error messages and what each one means.