Tutorials on Npm

Code dependencies are like Lego's . We're able to pull in other people's code; combining and stacking different packages together to fulfill our goals. Using dependencies greatly reduces the complexity of developing software. We can take advantage of the hard work someone has already done to solve a problem so we can continue to build the projects we want. A development pipeline can have multiple kinds of code dependencies: In JavaScript, we have a package.json file that holds metadata about our project. package.json can store things like our project name, the version of our project, and any dependencies our project has. Dependencies, devDependencies, and peerDependencies are properties that can be included in a package.json file. Depending on the instance where code will be used changes the type of dependency a package is. There are packages that our users will need to run our code. A user is someone not directly working in our code-base. This could mean a person interacting with an application we wrote, or a developer writing a completely separate library. In other words, this is a production environment. Alternatively, there are packages that a developer or system only needs while working in our code. For example linters, testing frameworks, build tools, etc. Packages that a user won't need, but a developer or build system will need.

npm centralizes third-party, open-source Node.js packages and libraries within a large, online registry. Contributing to the Node.js ecosystem involves no vetting process, which lets anyone publish packages to the npm registry with little effort. Not only has npm's short process for publishing packages led to the explosive growth of the Node.js ecosystem, but also fosters the development of various types of packages: front-end libraries/frameworks, tooling, bundlers, routers, state management, etc. However, this comes at the cost of more packages being released with more security vulnerabilities and less reliability. Despite these concerns, npm continues to introduce new features and statistics for helping developers identify high quality packages. A library author uses npm's command line client to publish their library's package to the npm registry and share it. Once published, npm allows developers to update their projects' dependencies with the latest version of this package or install this package within their projects. Below, I'm going to show you how to publish a package to the npm registry.