In this exercise, we're going to build a basic HTTP server like the one before, but now with Hapi.js. You will notice how most of the things are done for us under the hood with Hapi.js. However, Hapi.js is also built on top of the http module.

For the rest of the exercises, from the first exercise of Chapter 3, Building the API – Part 2, we will be building on top of each exercise as we progress. So, we might need to go back and modify previous files and so forth:

1. In your Lesson-2 folder, create a subfolder called hello-hapi.

2. On the Terminal, change directory to the root of the hello-hapi folder.
3. Initialize it as a basic Node.js project and run the following command:

npm init -y

4. Create a file, server.js.
5. Install Hapi.js by executing the following command:

npm install hapi --save

6. In the file, write the following code:

const Hapi = require('hapi');
// create a server with a host and port
const server = new Hapi.Server();
server.connection
({
  host: 'localhost',
  port: 8000,
});
// Start the server
server.start((err) => 
{
  if (err) throw err;
  console.log(`Server running at: ${server.info.uri}`);
});

Let us try to understand the code:

• We first start by requiring the Hapi.js framework that we just included.

• We then create a server by initializing the Server class, hence a new Hapi.Server().
• We then bind that server on a specific host (localhost) and port (8000).

• After that, we create an example route, /. As you can see, for each route created, we have to specify three major things (as keys of an object passed to the server.route method):
  • method: This is the HTTP method for that route. We're going to look more deeply at the types of HTTP verbs in a later section. For our example, we're using GET. Basically, as the name suggests, this gets stuff/resources from the server.
  • path: This is the path on the server to the particular resource we are getting.
  • handler: This is a closure (anonymous function) that does the actual getting.

• After this setup is done, we then start the server using the server.start method. This method accepts a closure (callback function) that is called once the server has started. In this function, we can check whether any errors occurred while starting the server.

7. Run the server by going to the Terminal, and run the following command:

node server.js

8. You should see this printed on the Terminal:

Server running at: http://localhost:8000

You should see something similar to this at http://localhost:8000:

Here, we're saying, if the port is provided as the first argument of the script, use that, otherwise, use 8000 as the port number. Now, when you run: node server.js 8002, the server should run okay from localhost:8002.