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What is npm?

npm is the command-line interface to the npm ecosystem. It is battle-tested, surprisingly flexible, and used by hundreds of thousands of JavaScript developers every day.
npm is a tool in the Front End Package Manager category of a tech stack.
npm is an open source tool with 17.5K GitHub stars and 3K GitHub forks. Here’s a link to npm's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses npm?

Companies
6057 companies reportedly use npm in their tech stacks, including Instacart, reddit, and CRED.

Developers
90744 developers on StackShare have stated that they use npm.

npm Integrations

Bitbucket, Yarn, Travis CI, Snyk, and JFrog Artifactory are some of the popular tools that integrate with npm. Here's a list of all 36 tools that integrate with npm.
Pros of npm
647
Best package management system for javascript
382
Open-source
327
Great community
148
More packages than rubygems, pypi, or packagist
112
Nice people matter
6
As fast as yarn but really free of facebook
6
Audit feature
4
Good following
1
Super fast
1
Stability
Decisions about npm

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose npm in their tech stack.

Eugene Cheah

Our CLI was originally written Node.js with npm , 2 years ago. We have now migrated to Go !

It was something we quickly hacked together at the early beginnings of Uilicious when our focus was to move fast and iterate the product quickly. We wanted to roll out the CLI ASAP, so that users with a CI/CD can hook up their tests to their front-end deployment pipeline.

However after 2 years, with NPM dependency hell pains - We decided to migrate our CLI toolchain to Go for

  • Zero deployment dependencies
  • Single file distribution (and backwards compatible with NPM)

Happy with how it is : article covers the decision in much deeper details

https://dev.to/uilicious/why-we-migrated-our-cli-from-nodejs-to-golang-1ol8

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Shared insights
on
PostgreSQL ModelerPostgreSQL Modeler

Vue.js vuex Vue Router Quasar Framework Electron Node.js npm Yarn Git GitHub Netlify My tech stack that helps me develop quickly and efficiently. Wouldn't want it any other way.

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Needs advice
on
npmnpm
and
YarnYarn

From a StackShare Community member: “I’m a freelance web developer (I mostly use Node.js) and for future projects I’m debating between npm or Yarn as my default package manager. I’m a minimalist so I hate installing software if I don’t need to- in this case that would be Yarn. For those who made the switch from npm to Yarn, what benefits have you noticed? For those who stuck with npm, are you happy you with it?"

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Joshua Dean Küpper
CEO at Scrayos UG (haftungsbeschränkt) · | 7 upvotes · 615.8K views

For our internal team and collaboration panel we use Nuxt.js (with TypeScript that is transpiled into ES6), Webpack and npm. We enjoy the opinionated nature of Nuxt.js over vanilla Vue.js, as we would end up using all of the components Nuxt.js incorporates anyways and we can adhere to the conventions setup by the Nuxt.js project, which allows us to get better support in case we run into any dead ends. Webpack allows us to create reproducable builds and also debug our application with hot reloads, which greately increased the pace at which we are able to perform and test changes. We also incorporated a lot of testing (ESLint, Chai, Jasmine, Nightwatchjs) into our pipelines and can trigger those jobs through GitLab CI. All packages are fetched through npm, so that we can keep our git repositories slim and are notified of new updates aswell as reported security flaws.

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Rick Maltese
founder at Webcompose.ca · | 6 upvotes · 74.8K views
Needs advice
on
MarkdownMarkdown
and
PHPPHP

I am a newbie to StackShare and the GitHub community. I want to understand how to use an include statement to get a collection of Markdown files to create a book. I have been told that there are a number of useful tools. My problem is that npm and Node.js are also very new to me. Any suggestions on how to get my md chapters into a printable document would be helpful.

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Simon Reymann
Senior Fullstack Developer at QUANTUSflow Software GmbH · | 27 upvotes · 4.9M views

Our whole Node.js backend stack consists of the following tools:

  • Lerna as a tool for multi package and multi repository management
  • npm as package manager
  • NestJS as Node.js framework
  • TypeScript as programming language
  • ExpressJS as web server
  • Swagger UI for visualizing and interacting with the API’s resources
  • Postman as a tool for API development
  • TypeORM as object relational mapping layer
  • JSON Web Token for access token management

The main reason we have chosen Node.js over PHP is related to the following artifacts:

  • Made for the web and widely in use: Node.js is a software platform for developing server-side network services. Well-known projects that rely on Node.js include the blogging software Ghost, the project management tool Trello and the operating system WebOS. Node.js requires the JavaScript runtime environment V8, which was specially developed by Google for the popular Chrome browser. This guarantees a very resource-saving architecture, which qualifies Node.js especially for the operation of a web server. Ryan Dahl, the developer of Node.js, released the first stable version on May 27, 2009. He developed Node.js out of dissatisfaction with the possibilities that JavaScript offered at the time. The basic functionality of Node.js has been mapped with JavaScript since the first version, which can be expanded with a large number of different modules. The current package managers (npm or Yarn) for Node.js know more than 1,000,000 of these modules.
  • Fast server-side solutions: Node.js adopts the JavaScript "event-loop" to create non-blocking I/O applications that conveniently serve simultaneous events. With the standard available asynchronous processing within JavaScript/TypeScript, highly scalable, server-side solutions can be realized. The efficient use of the CPU and the RAM is maximized and more simultaneous requests can be processed than with conventional multi-thread servers.
  • A language along the entire stack: Widely used frameworks such as React or AngularJS or Vue.js, which we prefer, are written in JavaScript/TypeScript. If Node.js is now used on the server side, you can use all the advantages of a uniform script language throughout the entire application development. The same language in the back- and frontend simplifies the maintenance of the application and also the coordination within the development team.
  • Flexibility: Node.js sets very few strict dependencies, rules and guidelines and thus grants a high degree of flexibility in application development. There are no strict conventions so that the appropriate architecture, design structures, modules and features can be freely selected for the development.
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Blog Posts

Node.jsnpmKubernetes+6
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JavaScriptGitHubPython+42
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npm Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to npm?
Yarn
Yarn caches every package it downloads so it never needs to again. It also parallelizes operations to maximize resource utilization so install times are faster than ever.
gulp
Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.
Apache Maven
Maven allows a project to build using its project object model (POM) and a set of plugins that are shared by all projects using Maven, providing a uniform build system. Once you familiarize yourself with how one Maven project builds you automatically know how all Maven projects build saving you immense amounts of time when trying to navigate many projects.
Bower
Bower is a package manager for the web. It offers a generic, unopinionated solution to the problem of front-end package management, while exposing the package dependency model via an API that can be consumed by a more opinionated build stack. There are no system wide dependencies, no dependencies are shared between different apps, and the dependency tree is flat.
NuGet
A free and open-source package manager designed for the Microsoft development platform. It is also distributed as a Visual Studio extension.
See all alternatives

npm's Followers
80427 developers follow npm to keep up with related blogs and decisions.