I think was one of the reasons for quick adoption of nodejs. As of writing this article there are close 7,00,000 packages on npm. If you want more details about packages across different platforms you can checkout I know it is comparing apples to organges when comparing packages across different platforms. But at-least it should give you some sense of adoption of node and javascript. npm http://www.modulecounts.com/ npm package growth Before getting started if you find anything interesting/useful in this article don’t forget to highlight them using our chrome extension https://bit.ly/highlights-extension Finding the right node package Since there are so many packages we have a problem of plenty. For any given scenario we have multiple packages and it becomes difficult to identify the right fit for your use case. I generally look up github repos of popular projects to finalise which package to use. This may not scale up always and need more work. So I have stuck to using for now. It has better search features and also has rating of various packages based on different parameters. You can read the rating logic on http://npms.io/ https://npms.io/about For example if you want to use packages you can search for the same which gives you an output like twitter api Do let me know if there is a curated list of node packages or some help groups which help us identify the right packages. Using additional features of npm If you are a node developer I am pretty sure that you have already used npm and you are comfortable with the popular commands and So let us look at a few other handy commands and features. npm init npm install Since there are more than 7,00,000 packages in node I wanted to make sure that there was a simple way to keep track of my favourite packages. There seems to be a way but not very user friendly. Getting started Create an account on https://www.npmjs.com/ From the interface I didn’t find any option to start my favorite packages. For now looks like we will have to make do with npm cli. Login on command line with your credentials. npm login One you hit the command enter your credentials. Currently it asks for email id which is public. I think npm figures out a way to mask the user email ids. I am not comfortable sharing my email id. npm login Once you are logged in, you can checkout if it was successful using the command. whoami npm whoami outptu of whoami Starring a package npm star axios Starring a package If you want a list of packages you have starred then you can use npm stars npm stars The command gives you the output like show in the above image. npm list Most of the packages in npm have dependencies on other libraries and that is a good thing. It means that packages are modular. For example if you are using axios( ) package you can checkout see the packages axio is using. If you want to see different packages that are using axios you can checkout https://www.npmjs.com/package/axios https://www.npmjs.com/package/axios?activeTab=dependencies https://www.npmjs.com/package/axios?activeTab=dependents If you want the complete dependency list you can use which gives a tree output like below. npm list npm list tree view Most of the times this is overwhelming and the first level packages should be a good enough check. npm list --depth=0 2>/dev/null If you use the above command you will get the list of first level packages in your project. npm list first level To go global or not As a rule of thumb I have tried to reduce the number of packages I install globally. It always makes sense to install the packages locally as long as they are related to the project. I only consider installing a package globally if its utility is beyond the project or has nothing to do with the project. You can run the following command to see your list of globally installed packages. npm list -g --depth=0 2>/dev/null In my case the output is npm list global packages As you can see from the list most of the packages are general purpose and have got nothing to do with individual projects. I am not sure why I installed jshint globally. My atom editor is setup with jshint and I think that should be sufficient. I will spend some time over the weekend to see why I did that. Security Audit In latest npm versions if there are any security concerns they get displayed when you run command. But if you want to do an audit of your existing packages run npm install npm audit npm audit This command gives you details of vulnerabilities in the package. It gives you details of the path so that you can judge the potential damage if any. If you want more details you can checkout the node security advisory. You can run a command like to fix the individual vulnerabilities as suggested or you can run to fix all the vulnerabilities at once like I did. npm update fsevents — depth 3 npm audit fix npm audit fix NPX Another problem that I have faced with installing packages globally is that every time I run one of these packages it would have a latest version released. So it kind of doesn’t much sense to install them in the first place. comes to your rescue. npx To know more about read the following article. npx _[You can also read this post in Russian.]_medium.com Introducing npx: an npm package runner For example to run mocha on a instance all you need to do is Isn’t that cool. The packages you saw on my instance are the ones that I had installed before coming across I haven’t installed any packages globally once I started using npx mocha npx npx. Licence crawler Let us look at one sample use case for using While most of the packages on npm are generally under MIT licence, it is better to take a look at the licences of all the packages when you are working on a project for your company. npx npx npm-license-crawler npm licence details npm, yarn or pnpm Well npm is not the only option out there. You have yarn and pnpm which are popular alternatives. Yarn was more like a wrapper around npm by facebook for addressing the shortcomings of npm. With competition heating up npm has been quick in implementing the features from yarn. If you are worried about disk space you can use pnpm. If you want a detailed comparison of these three you can checkout https://www.voitanos.io/blog/npm-yarn-pnpm-which-package-manager-should-you-use-for-sharepoint-framework-projects Please point out if I am missing something here or if you have got some tricks that would improve my usage of npm. If you liked this article and would like to read similar articles, . There is a limit of 50 claps on medium. Do check it out ;) don’t forget to clap My learning Series Last month I made a resolve to make some and have started this series as a part of that. conscious changes to my learning rhythm You can read the others articles from the series. _I have had a kind of “love and hate” relationship with Javascript. But nevertheless javascript was always intriguing…_hackernoon.com Understanding promises in Javascript _Async and Await are extensions of promises. So if you are not clear about the basics of promises please get comfortable…_hackernoon.com Understanding async-await in Javascript _Recently I had thrown a bounty for converting a flat json to a nested json. You can check more about it in the link…_hackernoon.com Understanding randomGenerator functions for testing Javascript functions

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