Exclusive updates on:

Node Package Manager

by Alex Blewitt on Jun 17, 2011 |

Since its 1.0 release last month, the Node Package Manager has had a number of point revisions and is being increasingly used to manage Node.js runtimes.

With its deceptively simple one-line install (curl http://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh), provided that Node.js is already installed on the system. This allows you to acquire further Node packages using npm install, much like Python's easy_install or Perl's CPAN.

Node packages are represented as package.json files. The self-documenting npm help json gives the documentation (at https://github.com/isaacs/npm/blob/master/doc/json.md) gives a list of what's required, but includes:

name: something descriptive, and will be part of the URL and command line invocations (see the Npm Registry for examples)
version: based on semantic versioning, but permits versions to start with a v and to treat anything with a dash as unreleased code (so that git describe can be used to version contents easily)
description: short descriptive text, suitable for presenting to a user or searching
keywords: for search optimisation
homepage: the human-viewable website
url: location of package if it's not the same location as the package.json
main: the object to be returned at startup
files: the files as part of this package
repository: the location and type of where to access the sources or to contribute bug fixes
config: a set of parameters which can be acquired by your code, as well as overridden in the command with node config set