If one wants to jump start a project in Node.js with express. one would use express-generator. After creating a new project your file tree will look like this
.
├── app.js
├── bin
│ └── www
├── package.json
├── public
│ ├── images
│ ├── javascripts
│ └── stylesheets
│ └── style.css
├── routes
│ ├── index.js
│ └── users.js
└── views
├── error.pug
├── index.pug
└── layout.pug
One thing that stood out for me is that to run the app you need to do node bin/www or a predefined shortcut npm run. My question is why would one use the www the way it is and not add a .js extension and remove #!/usr/bin/env node from the top of the file? Are there any benefits of doing it this way or is it a personal preference?
Let's look at the first line of the bin/www file:
#!/usr/bin/env node
This shebang tells the *nix operating system how to interpret the file if you try to run it as a program.
So this file can be started as a program. And in Linux traditionally executable files do not have an extension.