Question

A module that uses the spawn function from child-process module to call a program and helps programmers use that program with node.

Examples:

https://github.com/schaermu/node-fluent-ffmpeg

https://github.com/xonecas/ffmpeg-node

https://github.com/rsms/node-imagemagick

They all use a different name to describe it. API, driver, wrapper, module. Which one is correct?

Answer 1

A module is a file of code exposing some kind of API to module.exports.

An API is a description of how you publicly access functionality from a certain library or module or set of code.

A wrapper is an abstraction layer around something. It’s a very generic term.

A driver is implementing an interface for a piece of hardware. Generally in node.js we call implementing the well defined interface for a database engine a driver.

A module that uses the spawn function
from child-process module to call a
program and helps programmers use that
program with node.

A module is a module, A module exposes an API, a module is always a wrapper around something. If said module spawns child proccesses to unix shell commands and provides a sensible API on top of low level C programs then it can be called a driver.