Node Hero – Using NPM: Tutorial

This is the second post of the tutorial series called Node Hero – in these chapters you can learn how to get started with Node.jsNode.js is an asynchronous event-driven JavaScript runtime and is the most effective when building scalable network applications. Node.js is free of locks, so there's no chance to dead-lock any process. and deliver software products using it. In this chapter, you’ll learn what NPMnpm is a software registry that serves over 1.3 million packages. npm is used by open source developers from all around the world to share and borrow code, as well as many businesses. There are three components to npm: the website the Command Line Interface (CLI) the registry Use the website to discover and download packages, create user profiles, and... is and how to use it. Let’s get started!

See all chapters of the Node Hero tutorial series:

1. Getting started with Node.js
2. Using NPM [ this article ]
3. Understanding async programming
4. Your first Node.js HTTP server
5. Node.js database tutorial
6. Node.js request module tutorial
7. Node.js project structure tutorial
8. Node.js authentication using Passport.js
9. Node.js unit testing tutorial
10. Debugging Node.js applications
11. Node.js Security Tutorial
12. How to Deploy Node.js Applications
13. Monitoring Node.js Applications

NPM in a Nutshell

NPM is the package manager used by Node.js applications – you can find a ton of modules here, so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It is like Maven for Java or Composer for PHP. There are two primary interfaces you will interact with – the NPM website and the NPM command line toolkit.

Both the website and the CLI uses the same registry to show modules and search for them.

The Website

The NPM website can be found at https://npmjs.com. Here you can sign up as a new user or search for packages.

The Command Line Interface

To run the CLI you can run it simply with:

npm

Note, that NPM is bundled with the Node.js binary, so you don’t have to install it – however, if you want to use a specific npm version, you can update it. If you want to install npm version 3, you can do that with: npm install npm@3 -g.

Using NPM: Tutorial

You have already met NPM in the last article on Getting started with Node.js when you created the package.json file. Let’s extend that knowledge!

Adding Dependencies

In this section you are going to learn how to add runtime dependencies to your application.

Once you have your package.json file you can add dependencies to your application. Let’s add one! Try the following:

npm install lodash --save

With this single command we achieved two things: first of all, lodash is downloaded and placed into the node_modules folder. This is the folder where all your external dependencies will be put. Usually, you don’t want to add this folder to your source control, so if you are using git make sure to add it to the .gitignore file.

This can be a good starting point for your .gitignore

Let’s take a look at what happened in the package.json file! A new property called dependencies have appeared:

"dependencies": {
  "lodash": "4.6.1"
}

This means that lodash with version 4.6.1 is now installed and ready to be used. Note, that NPM follows SemVer to version packages.

Given a version number MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH, increment the MAJOR version when you make incompatible API changes, MINOR version when you add functionality in a backwards-compatible manner, and PATCH version when you make backwards-compatible bug fixes. For more information: http://semver.org/

As lodash is ready to be used, let’s see how we can do so! You can do it in the same way you did it with your own module except now you don’t have to define the path, only the name of the module:

// index.js
const _ = require('lodash')

_.assign({ 'a': 1 }, { 'b': 2 }, { 'c': 3 });
// → { 'a': 1, 'b': 2, 'c': 3 }

Adding Development Dependencies

In this section you are going to learn how to add build-time dependencies to your application.

When you are building web applications, you may need to minify your JavaScript files, concatenating CSS files and so on. The modules that will do it will be only ran during the building of the assets, so the running application doesn’t need them.

You can install such scripts with:

npm install mocha --save-dev

Once you do that, a new section will appear in your package.json file called devDependencies. All the modules you install with --save-dev will be placed there – also, they will be put in the very same node_modules directory.

NPM Scripts

NPM script is a very powerful concept – with the help of them you can build small utilities or even compose complex build systems.

The most common ones are the start and the test scripts. With the start you can define how one should start your application, while test is for running tests. In your package.json they can look something like this:

  "scripts": {
    "start": "node index.js",
    "test": "mocha test",
    "your-custom-script": "echo npm"
  }

Things to notice here:

• start: pretty straightforward, it just describes the starting point of your application, it can be invoked with npm start
• test: the purpose of this one is to run your tests – one gotcha here is that in this case mocha doesn’t need to be installed globally, as npm will look for it in the node_modules/.bin folder, and mocha will be placed there as well. It can be invoked with: npm test.
• your-custom-script: anything that you want, you can pick any name. It can be invoked with npm run your-custom-script – don’t forget the run part!

Scoped / Private Packages

Originally NPM had a global shared namespace for module names – with more than 475.000 modules in the registry most of the simple names are already taken. Also, the global namespace contains public modules only.

NPM addressed this problem with the introduction of scoped packages. Scoped packages has the following naming pattern:

@myorg/mypackage

You can install scoped packages the same way as you did before:

npm install @myorg/mypackage --save

It will show up in your package.json in the following way:

"dependencies": {
  "@myorg/mypackage": "^1.0.0"
}

Requiring scoped packages works as expected:

require('@myorg/mypackage')

For more information refer to the NPM scoped module docs.

Next Up: Async Programming

In the next chapter, you can learn the principles of async programming using callbacks and Promises – subscribe to our newsletter for updates.

In the meantime if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to ask!