nodejs-best-practices

Guidance for making Node.js backend design choices. Node.js is a tool for running JavaScript on servers, and the guidance covers frameworks, asynchronous work, validation, errors, security, deployment, and team needs.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when starting or reshaping a Node.js service and deciding on a framework, runtime approach, concurrency model, validation, error handling, or security trade-offs.
Why use it?
It helps avoid choosing a familiar technology by habit when the deployment environment, traffic pattern, or existing code calls for something else.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/phuonghx/aim-cli/nodejs-best-practices
Any agent
npx skills add phuonghx/aim-cli --skill nodejs-best-practices
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/phuonghx/aim-cli

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 86 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,621 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00086 $0.01621
Opus 5 $0.00043 $0.00811
Sonnet 5 $0.00017 $0.00324
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00162

Measured yesterday against content hash e3c7977edbb6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

nodejs-best-practices scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured yesterday.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

aim/templates/aim-agents/skills/nodejs-best-practices/SKILL.md · 133 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 133 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Node.js Backend Decisions

The aim here is judgment, not recipes. Identical projects rarely exist, so resist reaching for the same stack and layout every time. When the requirements leave a choice open, surface the trade-off and ask before committing.

Picking a framework

Start from where the code will run and how much structure the team needs, then narrow:

  • Functions at the edge (Vercel, Cloudflare, Netlify) reward tiny footprints and fast cold starts -- reach for Hono.
  • Throughput-sensitive HTTP services where every millisecond counts favor Fastify (its schema-driven serialization is a real edge; still measure against your own routes).
  • Teams that want opinionated structure, dependency injection, and decorators out of the box lean toward NestJS.
  • Brownfield systems or cases needing the widest middleware catalog stay on Express.
  • A frontend already in play (Next.js) often makes route handlers or tRPC the path of least resistance.

Questions worth answering before you decide: Where does this deploy? Does cold-start latency show up in the SLO? What has the team shipped before? Is there existing code that constrains the choice?

Choosing the runtime layer

TypeScript without a build step. Recent Node LTS strips types from .ts files on the fly, so node server.ts runs directly. The catch: only erasable syntax works -- enum, runtime namespace, and constructor parameter properties will throw. When you need those, run through tsx instead. This is handy for one-off scripts and lean services.

Modules. New code should be ESM (import/export) -- it tree-shakes better and is the direction the ecosystem is moving. Stick with CommonJS (require) only when an existing codebase or a stubborn dependency forces it.

Which runtime. Node remains the safe default with the deepest ecosystem. Bun is worth a look when raw speed and an integrated toolchain matter; Deno appeals when you want TypeScript and a permissions model built in.

Read the full file on GitHub · 133 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. yesterday First seen · 133 lines · 86 tokens per session scan A e3c7977edbb6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

nodejs-best-practices is a skill published in the GitHub repository phuonghx/aim-cli (1 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 86 tokens to every session and 1,621 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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