Question

When I download a third party module for example:

npm install twitter

How can I tell what functions/methods are available when I create an object. Example:

var twitter = require('twitter');

This also applies with the “hello world webserver” you commonly see with node.js

var http = require('http');

var server = http.createServer(function(req, res) {
  res.writeHead(200);
  res.end('Hello Http');
});
server.listen(8080);

Is there some command I can run on the http module to get a list of functions/methods like .createServer()

I could dig around for online documentation about the specific module but was hoping there was a command line way of simply retrieving a list of available functions/methods

Btw… in node.js what do they call them? Functions or Methods?

Answer 1

Did you try?

var http = require('http');
console.log(http)

To see what is in object there is also beautiful module called “util”:

var util = require('util'); 
console.log(util.inspect(http))

util.inspect returns string representation of object.