Some useful npm commands

What is npm?

npm is a package manager for the JavaScript programming language. It is the default package manager for Node.js. Recently I completed a learning path Build JavaScript applications with Node.js and found some basic and useful npm commands which were very helpful to me, so I thought of sharing.

Here are some useful npm commands.

To create a package.json in interactive mode, you can use the npm init command.

npm init

To create a package.json in non interactive mode, use the npm init -y command.

npm init -y
- To get full detailed list of all the commands, type npm --help.

npm --help

To install any package, you can use npm install command followed by package name.

npm install <package name>

To install a package for development only which wont be shipped with production build, try the npm install with save-dev parameter. It also adds an entry in devDependencies in package.json.

npm install <package name> --save-dev

To install a package for production, try with production parameter. It adds an entry in dependencies in package.json.

npm install <package name> --production

To install a package in global directory instead of project's node_modules directory, use the g parameter.

npm install <package name> -g

To take care of fetching the dependency and carrying out the command, and clean up so it is not saved (or do not take up space) in node_modules folder, try the following command.

npx <name of package>

To list all the packages that your project is depending on, try the npm list command. It uses dependencies section from package.json. Use depth=0 for first level dependencies and depth=1 for 2nd level dependencies and so on.

npm list --depth=<depth>

To uninstall a package you use the uninstall command. It will remove the package from the manifest file and also from the node_modules directory.

npm uninstall <name of dependency>

To remove all dependencies in the node_modules directory that are not listed as dependencies in the manifest file, you can try the prune command.

npm prune

To list all the outdated packages, use the outdated command

npm outdated

To list vulnerabilities by different severity levels, high, and low for all the packages used in your project, use audit command

npm audit

To fix the vulnerabilities found by audit, try the audit command with fix.

npm audit fix

To fix the vulnerabilities found by audit forcefully, try the force parameter.

npm audit fix --force

To install the latest version, use @latest with npm install command.

npm install node-fetch@latest lodash@latest

The following instruction will update to the latest patch version. If you only want the patch version to update, you would specify like this ~1.0.0. What this instruction says is equal or great to in the same range.

~1.1.1 or 1.1.x