8 JavaScript Libraries To Increase Your Productivity

With code snippets!

By now, these small introductions are becoming obsolete. But still. Libraries in JavaScript can improve productivity by a ton. Instead of wasting hours on several functions, you can add an open-source alternative that is always updated to feature the fastest and most modern code so you don’t have to.

Let’s check out a few libraries that I’ve personally used that you can fit in a lot of different applications from mobile apps with React Native to beautiful web applications.

Luxon

A very popular date/time manipulation library is Luxon. It is the best choice for new projects because it uses the more modern Intl object. It has functions for parsing, manipulating, and creating everything related to time. Another, slightly deprecated library you could also use is Moment.

Lodash

One of the most popular utility libraries is Lodash. Lodash has a huge feature set of functions that can help complete certain tasks when you’re working with arrays or objects. The syntax is intuitive and the documentation provides good examples.

Nodemon

When you’re developing a web application, Nodemon can’t miss. Nodemon makes developing web applications easier by restarting the server automatically when it senses a change in the files. This saves having to restart the server yourself for every change you make.

NanoID

Creating IDs that aren’t just auto-incremented can be a hassle. NanoID creates an alphanumeric ID that is smaller than usual UUIDs and still very safe. The library itself can be minified and zipped to only 108 bytes.

This makes it one of the smallest libraries for creating safe and unique IDs. Especially if you don’t expect millions of objects with unique IDs. And even then it should still hold up great.

Passport

Authentication used to be difficult to implement, or just outright annoying if you need to do it. Passport helps with that. Passport is authentication middleware for Node servers. It can be used with all major types of authentication such as Facebook login and Google Auth.

Faker

Faker is a great way of quickly adding fake data into your application for testing purposes. Don’t waste any more time on filling your database with real-looking names, pictures, or bank info.

UUID

UUID, or Universally Unique Identifiers, are a way of storing unique values. It is compliant with the ‘rules’ of typical UUIDs and can be used in a database as the UUID type in most cases. It is more secure than auto-increment IDs or NanoIDs because of the size and its inability to guess one correct.

Axios

Axios is a very well-known HTTP request library. It is easy to use and doesn’t require anything you don’t want to send or set every time. I use this library and I can’t imagine a better one.

Conclusion

There are a lot of other libraries you can use. Just browse the Package Manager list by yourself and you can really see how many there are.

Thank you very much for reading and have a wonderful day.