How to Create Word Documents with Node.js

Microsoft Word is a very popular word processor. It is a popular format for making and exchanging documents. Therefore, a feature of a lot of apps is to create Word documents from other kinds of documents. Creating Word documents is easy in Node.js apps with third party libraries. We can make an app from it easily ourselves.

In this article, we will make an app that lets users enter their document in a rich text editor and generate a Word document from it. We will use Express for back end and React for front end.

Back End

We will start with the back end. To start, we will create a project folder with the backend folder inside. Then in the backend folder run npx express-generator to create the Express app. Then run npm i to install the packages Next we install our own packages. We need Babel for run the app with the latest version of JavaScript, CORS for cross domain requests with front end, HTML-DOCX-JS for converting HTML strings to Word documents, Multer for file upload, Sequelize for ORM, and SQLite3 for our database.

We install all of these by running npm i @babel/cli @babel/core @babel/node @babel/preset-env cors html-docx-js sequelize sqlite3 multer .

After that we change the scripts section of package.json to have:

"start": "nodemon --exec npm run babel-node --  ./bin/www",
"babel-node": "babel-node"