Package Manager in Node

In many ways, the success of Node.js is due to growth in the number and quality of packages available to the developer community, distributed via the Node package management system (NPM).

NPM is a Node package management system and online repository for publishing open-source Node.js custom or user-created packages. It is also a command-line utility for interacting with the online repository that aids in package installation, version management, and dependency management.

In creating a custom package, you can make it private or public for others. We will not cover private packages in this guide, but we will learn how to install, update, and run scripts using NPM.

Installing packages

To install any package into your Node.js project, you need the full name of the package you want to install, then use it with the command as shown below:

npm install is-even

npm is the package manager and a command line utility, install is the command we want to run, which takes in is-even as the name of the package we will pull from the online repository and install into our local repository and project.

Updating a package

Assuming you want to update the version of a package you installed earlier. You can use the following command to achieve it.

npm update [email protected]

You can update a specific package by specifying the version number or update all packages using npm update command.

Running your Node project

Professionally, when creating a Node project, you include a package.json file to manage your dependencies and some project metadata. You can create a blank package.json file using the following command:

npm init -y

Specifying the -y flag means you want to accept all the defaults. Now, you can add a script section on your package.json file to run some commands using NPM. Let’s take a look at how to run a Node project using NPM:

{
  "name": "tests",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \\"Error: no test specified\\" && exit 1",
		"start": "node index.js"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

Look at the script above. The start property inside the scripts object tells NPM how to start the Node project. Running the start command using NPM will start our Node project:

npm run start

You can specify as many commands you want to run in the scripts section and run it using the run command in NPM.