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
vand to treat anything with a dash as unreleased code (so thatgit describecan 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
Node package manager is available on http://github.com/isaacs/npm for those that want to refer to the Readme or to fork the code.
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