Node.js is a JavaScript runtime built on Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine that uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model. It allows creation of web servers and networking tools using JavaScript. The npm package ecosystem is the largest ecosystem of open source libraries in the world and is the default package manager for Node.js. Node.js has asynchronous, non-blocking APIs and uses an event loop model that makes it lightweight and efficient for building scalable web servers and applications.