Npm calculates the dependencies and installs the latest available version of those as well. Let’s say you install cowsay, a cool command line tool that lets you make a cow say things. When you npm install cowsay, this entry is added to the package.json file:. Adding dependencies to a package.json file from the command line. To add dependencies and devDependencies to a package.json file from the command line, you can install them in the root directory of your package using the -save-prod flag for dependencies (the default behavior of npm install) or the -save-dev flag for devDependencies.
One of the really cool, less known and typically forgotten features of NPM and Yarn is the ability to install git repositories directly as part of the package install command.
Whether you are working on a serverside javascript project using NodeJS or a client-side application using any of the build tools such as Webpack, Gulp or even, good old Grunt, you might come to the point where you need to use a private or public GitHub repository as a dependency in your
package.json
.Here, we will be going over how to reference a Github repo as one of the modules in your package.json. We will start with a public repo and then go over how you can set it up using a private repo.
1. Using a Public Repository as a Dependency
The general syntax for installing a package directly from GitHub follows the structure below. You will note that this is the process for installing the package via the command-line.
To use the GitHub repo as a dependency in your
package.json
, you can use the following syntax below:For public repositories, the syntax listed above works for all
git
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2. Using a Private Repository as a Dependency
When it comes to using a private repository as a module in your
package.json
. The syntax and the idea are very similar to the public version, the main change is that a form of authentication is added to the git syntax. There are 2 approaches to achieve this form of authentication, namely using HTTPS and SSH.2.a. Using a HTTPS
The first approach here is to use a special GitHub system user with access to the repository and generate an access token for this user that can be used directly as basic authentication in the HTTPS call.
To do that go to Settings >Developer settings on GitHub. There, you can select the Personal access tokens and click Generate new token. Once you define the scopes for the token you can use this token in
package.json
as follows:Be sure to select the types of access the system user needs. Typically, you would want to give only read access to the system user to limit risk. We will talk more about the downsides to using this approach later.
Once you have successfully added the token to your package.json, You can now delete your
node_modules
and then run npm install
command. This should install the package from the GitHub repo.The main disadvantage and obvious downside of this approach is that you are required to commit the token, however, as long as it’s for a private repository and you created a special read-only system account for this, you should be ok. There are actually various situations where using the SSH approach we are going to discuss next is not possible to do, an example is when you run NPM install within Docker containers or in environments where you cannot use SSH keys.
2.b. Using SSH
The second approach is very similar to the public option discussed in point #1 above, it just uses SSH for authentication. In this case, the URL to reference does not need any token like in the code sample below.
For this SSH approach to work, you need to be sure you have access to this particular repository and you have generated SSH keys for yourself or the user account that’s going to run this install in Settings >SSH and GPG keys. Follow the guide on GitHub on how to set up SSH keys.
Even though the SSH option is clearly more secure and should be the preferred approach whenever you need to do this. There might be a case where the token works better or is the only option available.
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Today I was listening to the NodeUp episode 70, which is all about the npm command line client. And there is tons of useful information in this episode. It is all about where npm is at the moment and what the plans are for the future. Especially the recent changes inside of the command line client are a heavy discussed topic and I highly recommend to listen to this episode, when you are dealing with npm on a daily basis.
One thing that is mentioned and really gets me excited is the change regarding the functionality to run scripts via npm which was introduced in the latest major version of npm – [email protected].
So let us reassess how to run scripts via npm, have a look at what has changed in version 2.0.0 and check why this is such a big deal.
Running scripts via npm
The configuration file for any project based on node and npm is the
package.json
. This file includes meta information like name, version and author of the depending project, but also defines all dependencies, which need to be installed via calling npm install
. If you are not familiar with this file, there is an excellent interactive cheat sheet out there and you may want to check it out.One thing to notice is that you can also run scripts and execute commands via npm. To do so you can define an optional object as the
scripts
property inside of the package.json
and define your wished commands. @substack wrote a great article about how to use this functionality extensively.There is not much magic about this.
And then you can use
npm run
to kick it off – pretty straight forward.This functionality had one downside so far. It was not able to pass arguments to the
npm run
command. And that is why you had to hardcode the arguments, which made the whole thing less flexible and harder to use. The only solution for having similar commands with different arguments was to define specific named scripts inside of the package.json
including different arguments.Passing arguments to npm run
Since version 2.0.0 it is now possible to pass arguments to the scripts defined in the
package.json
. And this is a big improvement on flexibility and makes the whole thing much more powerful. The package.json
above including two scripts running the echo
command can be combined into one and can accept the wished arguments.The syntax to pass arguments to the defined scripts is as follows. You have to use
npm run
and then devided by two dashes(--
) you can pass any arguments you like to the command.Setting up Grunt and gulp without the global dependency
Using the
echo
command might not seem really useful, but we will come to a much more useful example now. I am doing mostly frontend development and that is why in almost every project that I work on either Grunt or gulp is included. Grunt and gulp are task runners, that come with huge plugin registries to help automate any task you can think of.When you check the getting started guide of both projects you will find the instruction to install them globally.
This is absolutely fine when you are working alone and these tools are only supposed to be executed on your machine. But when you work together with other colleagues on a project or your process includes a continuous integration system, then every global dependency can be quite troublesome. It simply moves the entry barrier a bit higher and increases the complexity to get everything up and running.
So let us have a look how to avoid that. First step is to install the needed modules in our project and not globally anymore.
By calling
npm install
npm will install the module and depending, if it has the bin
property defined, it will create a .bin
folder inside of the node_modules
folder. This means that this folder will include all defined command line interfaces of your installed modules. In this case the .bin
folder includes the binaries gulp
and grunt
.If you want to use either Grunt or gulp via the
npm run
command now, you can set them up inside of your package.json
.Npm Package Dependency Version Syntax
And then you can easily run your defined tasks with npm.
But wait, it comes even better!
To make it a bit nicer npm provides a nifty feature, when setting up custom scripts. It puts
./node_modules/.bin
in the PATH
environment, when it executes the script.This means, we can make the
package.json
a bit cleaner.For me this is pure awesomeness!
It means not only dropping a global dependency but rather simplifying the whole work and setup flow.
Getting everything up and running is not
- installing node (which will install npm also)
- installing dependencies
- installing global dependencies
- and run e.g. Grunt
anymore.
It becomes
- installing node
- installing dependencies
- and run everything via npm scripts
only.
If you want to play around with this I set up an example repository, which includes Grunt and gulp ready to use without any global installation.
Sum up
Npm Dependency Version Syntax Free
For me it is clear, that I will drop any project required global dependency that can be installed via npm in the future, because having less global dependencies just means less troubles and quicker setup.
And that is it for now and if you have any comments or ideas on that, please let me know. I hope you enjoyed it. :)