7 NPM Commands to help you save time.

As JavaScript developers, NPM is something that we always use and we have a script continously running on the terminal.

What if we could save some time using it?

1. Open documentation directly from npm

What if we could directly jump to the documentation of a package from using npm?

npm home package-name

# for example:

npm home react  # would take you to reactjs.org in the browser/

2. Open the bugs 🐛 page

Just in case, we wanted to file a bug on the package.

npm bugs package-name

# for example:
npm bugs @agney/playground

This would open the github issues page (or any issues page) in the browser if linked by the package author.

3. See all scripts in your package.

It's hard to remember script names esp. if you did not write them in the first place. Instead of going to package.json, you can run the following command to see script names and commands being run.

npm run

4. Skip all the init questions

When you run npm init, it asks you a number of questions. You can go ahead and answer all of them, but it's much better to skip and accept the default for most of the time.

npm init -yes

5. Updating packages to latest.

The default command for NPM CLI would only update the packages respecting the semver range specified in package.json.

npm update

However, I don't think we believe in package authors or ourselves to change the semver indicators. yarn provides a nice enough utility with yarn upgrade-interactive --latest, but it's not available for NPM.

To clone this functionality with NPM, you can use a package named npm-check.

npx npm-check --update

6. Faster npm install on CI

npm install comes with some baggage (user oriented features) that makes it inherently slow. But we do need these on the CI server, NPM allows us to skip these with a command.

npm ci

You can add replace the npm install with npm ci in your CI servers and do fine if you have a package-lock.json.

For example, Travis CI configuration would be:

# .travis.yml
install:
- npm ci
# keep the npm cache around to speed up installs
cache:
  directories:
  - "$HOME/.npm"

7. A Better npm publish

npm publishis good, it can update your package version with semver and then push the package onto the registry.

But this does leave out some of the important steps: Building and testing the package. To automate these to be performed, you can use the prepublish script.

"scripts": {
    "prepublish": "npm run build"
}

But prepublish is executed on each install and hence not the best place to create changelogs or run your tests. After taking some criticism on the naming (it's one of the hardest things anyway), NPM introduced some a new automatic hook prepublishOnly

"scripts": {
    "prepublishOnly": "npm test"
}

Or, better is the package np.

You can simply run:

npx np

and it will run all the necessary steps including installing packages, build and running the tests. It will also create a tag and release on Github 💌.

What tricks do you use to save time?