What is the 'global' object in NodeJS

Question

I\'ve just seen a weird behaviour of the this keyword in NodeJS environment. I\'m listing them with code. I\'ve run this codes with NodeJS v6.x, wi

Answer 1

Value of this in a node module:

this in NodeJS global scope is the current module.exports object, not the global object. This is different from a browser where the global scope is the global window object. Consider the following code executed in Node:

console.log(this);    // logs {}

module.exports.foo = 5;

console.log(this);   // log { foo:5 }

First we log an empty object because there are no values in module.exports in this module. Then we put foo on the module.exports object, when we then again log this we can see that it now logs the updated module.exports object.

How can we access the global object:

We can access the global object in node using the global keyword:

console.log(global);

The global object exposes a variety of useful properties about the environment. Also this is the place where functions as setImmediate and clearTimeout are located.