NetBeans NodeJS Plugin

NodeJS support for NetBeans, originally hosted on netbeans.org.

Provides a project type and support for running NodeJS projects and files in the NetBeans IDE.

Features

• A NodeJS project type which uses Node's built-in metadata: Any folder with a package.json file is a project
• Support for running projects or individual files in Node
• Detects dependencies by scanning sources, understands and can update package.json metadata
• Support for searching for libraries and adding them to a project (using npm under the hood)
• Clickable stack traces in the output window
  • Ability to download and open NodeJS's sources as links in a stack trace
• Allows the IDE to recognize scripts beginning with #!/usr/bin/env node as Javascript sources
• Detects and installs missing libraries

See this blog for a broader description of the project.

Requirements

• NodeJS > 0.6.0
• npm - Node Package Manager (if you have a recent version of NodeJS, you have it)
• Java 7 or greater

The plugin will function without Node installed, but is not very useful.

Recent NetBeans builds have a rewritten Javascript editor with much better code completion which works with NodeJS. Get a daily build or version 7.3 or later for the best experience.

Installation

Get it from this NetBeans update server - see the instructions, OR

Download the NBM file from the continuous build on timboudreau.com. It will be named nodejs-$VERSION.nbm.

install it using Tools | Plugins, on the Downloaded tab, in the IDE. Longer term, it will be available from the standard NetBeans update center, so no separate download will be needed.

Supported Platforms

This plugin was originally written before Node supported MS Windows. Windows is recently supported, and should work. Please file bugs if there are problems - your humble author is not a Windows user, but is happy to fix anything that doesn't work.

Building

The plugin is built using Maven:

cd node-projects
mvn install nbm:nbm

Projects In This Repository

The main NodeJS plugin is the node-projects plugin. There is also the skeleton of a Node platform for the Java/Nashorn-based AvatarJS project, which is still embryonic, and pending projects to develop code completion.

License

Sources are licensed under the MIT license, which amounts to: Do what you want with it but give credit where credit is due.

The original sources are available in the history of the netbeans.org contrib repository. They were moved here because netbeans.org's process for approving using third-party libraries was slowing down development. Such restrictions exist for good reason, but hosting elsewhere and using a more broadly compatible license was the most expedient solution. As the sole contributor and joint copyright holder, I can relicense it, so I did.