This thread made me think that I want to get a better grasp of what I can do through npm:
I knew about this feature and more or less know all the npm features, but I still feel a bit out of the loop about the ways people are using this tech/service. Care to fill me in on how you make use of the npm service and ecosystem?
Latest comments (36)
My favorite feature of NPM (the repository) is that I can use
pnpm
instead of the default client.It might be interesting to some that NPM is open. You can take it a step further than private packages and host your own NPM server that works out of the box with the npm command line tool we all know and love by simply setting a variable to a different host than npm.org somewhere.
Just saw this and thought it was brilliant!
Hey, lots of handy stuff in the comments but I noticed nobody has mentioned this yet. You can host your own NPM server and configure NPM to use your-registry.com in stead.
There are various packages on NPM itself (such as verdaccio) that offer a NPM server. Some are minimal, other are fully featured. You can use a custom NPM server not only to make your packages private (to your team) but also to serve as proxy, or have it fallback to NPM when your registry has no package by the name of what is being queried.
npm install -g yarn
npm pack <packagename>
to download tgz file of what gets installed on your machine.npm view <packagename>
to view the package.json of the package.Quick one: I recently made fastjs.link as a short linking service that links directly to the homepage of an npm package. Pretty useful for blogging on dev.to, actually!
Best thing is that dev-dependencies are accessible like globals in npm scripts.
So you can run "npm i" and then simply run every script and use global packages without installing them globally.
Checking if packages are up-to-date, I sometimes
npm outdated
to list packages' current version used, wanted version and latest version...."test": "mocha ..."...
npx mocha ...
for one-off commands; if NPX cannot find the binary there, it will temporarily download it!npx create-react-app
is awesomeOne of my pet-peeves is when a package is globally installed when it should be a devDependencies within a project. For example, if you use the TypeScript compiler in a project, "typescript" is a "devDependency"; do not make installing it globally a requirement. This lets different projects depend on different versions of the typescript compiler. It also makes it so that somebody can download your project and run a build without having to install additional dependencies. This goes for gulp, etc.
I also forgot a few:
npm info express dist-tags
NPM greater than version 5 is pretty amazing. Earlier versions, not so much. I would recommend yarn if you are stuck with earlier versions of NPM.
Oh, and don't forget that an
.npmrc
file local to your project overrides a global.npmrc
file: useful for CI servers (store a.npmrc
file with your project)!Good point on the project specific
.npmrc
.Another tip is that a separate repository (and credentials) can be configured per scope as well (credit Guillaume Martigny for mentioning scoped modules first below).
This can be useful if you have some private modules in a private repository but do not wish to proxy all requests for public modules through it as well.
I also agree npm link is very useful if working on multiple modules and testing fixes.
I use npm scripts to compile Pug and Sass, build my Hugo site, and optimize images. My Sam Hugo theme does something similar, without the images though.
Here's one not a lot of people know about.
npx comes bundled with npm 5.2.0+. It temporarily downloads then executes an npm package that's used as a script (such as create-react-app) without needing to install it anywhere on the machine.
A fun example if you want to try it out is cowsay, a little script that outputs an ASCII cow saying something:
Fantastic! Thanks for sharing Shawn!
I abuse the heck out of npm scripts. They aren't just for build, serve, and test!
For instance, as a SQA, I need to have packages like Jasmine and Protractor, and then use Protractor to kick off my tests and maintain my selenium package.
So in my package.json, I include in
scripts
:So what happens when I run
npm run protractor
is:Things this buys me:
npm i -g protractor
. NO. Bad. I don't want every onboarding to be a laundry list of global packages to install. Just use project dev-dependencies and scripts that alias the unweildy bin paths. Now everyone's computers can be happy cookie cutters without needing local aliasing and global installs.scripts
has a concept ofpre
andpost
runs, I can ensure everyone actually keeps chromedriver up to date with Chrome without having to keep tabs on that. It just worksnpm run protractor -- --suite=api
rather than always using the default.I'm half tempted to put in a
postprotractor
for runningnpm run eslint -- --fix e2e-tests/**
but I might hear complaints if I do that...But I do this set up on every project I'm on to keep things nice and tidy.
Worth noting that you don't need to write
node node_modules/.bin/protractor config
- you can just useprotractor config
and npm will figure out the rest for you :)Nifty! I'll try to remember that next time.
Don't want to be too much showy, but sub-packages are cool.
Basically, inside one repo, you have a main package that depend on smaller package. Check Pencil.js for a real-life example.
You don't have to use scoped packages, but I would recommend it.
Thanks to Lerna managing the whole thing is pretty easy.
I tried to like Lerna, but I can’t seem to. The sub packages approach is a lot cleaner. Although, I don’t recall what benefits lerna provides anymore given that npm supports linking and sub packages.
I used to use
npm link
, but when scope grows and dependency tree gets weirder, you can't continue to do everything by hand.My favorite features from Lerna:
lerna bootstrap --hoist
save space with hoist common dependencies.lerna add whatever --scope=mySubPackage
add a new dependency to a sub-package.lerna publish
Bump and publish all packages individually.Thanks for the insights. I really appreciate it!
One thing that comes to mind: you can use npm + unpkg to publish websites 😁