Back in the Flash days (I'm not that old, really) we would call the first class that is run when your application starts up the document class. In was common to call this class Main.as or just the name of your project with dot as after it. The language didn't force you to use any specific file name, but it didn't give any special treatment to any name in particular either. Well, in Node.js the creators have blessed us with some special features of a Javascript file named index.js. The name and function is similar to html's index.html as the main html file for a page.
Let's recall how to run a file with node. You can either cd down to the folder where the file resides or just explicitly state the file path (note, this is bash that I'm using in the mac terminal program):
bobolicious3000$ node ~/Little-Node-Projects/basic-require-object/index.js
Note that you could also omit the ".js" extension in the name and node will know to look for a Javascript file with that name:
bobolicious3000$ node ~/Little-Node-Projects/basic-require-object/index
Now here's the magic. If you just specify the name of a directory with no file name then node will automatically look for a file named index.js inside the specified folder:
bobolicious3000$ node ~/Little-Node-Projects/basic-require-object
The cool thing is that all of these commands will run the exact same file in the exact same way. Here's a super simple one-liner sample index.js file for you to try it out yourself!
index.js
console.log("The file ran!")
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