Getting started guide for Node.js
Welcome to rx! If you haven’t already, create a directory you’d like to use for this guide.
To get started, create a hello_world.js file with the following content:
const os = require('os');
console.log(`Hello world, I am ${os.hostname()}`);
This gets the hostname of the machine it’s running on. Try running this script with node directly:
$ node hello_world.js
Hello world, I am ks-macbook-air.lan
This should print the name of your current local machine. Now create a remote machine that mirrors your local state by running rx init:
$ rx init
This sets up rx in the current directory, similar to “git init”. It will prompt you to log in or create an rx account. Then it will set up a machine for you in the cloud, detect that your project is using Node, set that up, and copy over any local files (just hello_world.js, at the moment).
Now run your script in the cloud by adding “rx” before the node command:
$ rx node hello_world.js
Hello world, I am getting-started.rx
Congratulations, you just ran a Node script remotely! Try changing this script to print “Goodbye from <hostname>” and run rx node hello_world.py again:
$ rx node hello_world.js
Goodbye from getting-started.rx!
As you can see, the changes you made locally are immediately available on your remote instance. You can run any other commands you want on your instance, just prefix them with “rx”:
$ rx pwd
$ rx 'ls -lh > ls-out'
$ rx which npm
Feel free to continue to experiment with this script or check out the next section on managing dependencies.