Express.js Official Getting Started Guide

Four short pages and you have a working web server. Express's Getting Started guide is deliberately minimal — installing, Hello World, the Express generator, basic routing, serving static files, examples and an FAQ — and that minimalism is the entire philosophy of the framework showing through in its documentation.

The current documentation covers Express 5, with Express 4 docs still available through the version switcher and Express 3 marked deprecated. The installing page now requires Node 18 or later and walks through TypeScript setup alongside the plain JavaScript path, which is a welcome update.

What the starter guide covers

• Creating a project, running npm init, installing Express
• TypeScript type definitions and tsconfig setup
• A minimal Hello World server
• The Express generator for scaffolding a fuller project
• Basic routing — methods, paths, route parameters
• Serving static files with the built-in middleware

What's conspicuously absent

Middleware ordering, error handling, security headers, input validation, authentication, database access, structuring an app beyond one file, and testing. None of it is in the starter guide, and most of it is either buried in the Guide section or simply not Express's problem by design. That minimalism is a real feature of the framework and a real hazard in the documentation: a beginner can follow this guide exactly and produce a server with no error handler, no validation and no security middleware, and the docs will not have warned them.

The version situation deserves care too. Express 4 material dominates the internet — tutorials, Stack Overflow answers, blog posts — and Express 5 changed behaviour around async error handling and route patterns. Following a 4-era tutorial against a 5 install is a common and confusing failure.

Who it's for

Anyone who knows Node and wants a server running in ten minutes. As a reference it's excellent — terse, accurate, quick to scan. Skip it as a learning path if you're building something real: you need the Guide and Advanced Topics sections, particularly error handling and security best practices, and the starter pages won't tell you that. Skip it entirely if you don't have Node fundamentals yet.

Our take

Perfectly good documentation for a deliberately small framework, listed here as though it were a course when it's four pages. The gap between what these pages teach and what a production Express app needs is enormous, and nothing on the page acknowledges it. Use it to start, then go read the security best practices page before anyone else can reach your server.