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NPM Tips and Tricks

Posted: 5/17/2019

NPM Global install fail

Ever get the dreaded EACCES error after running npm install -g? You’re not alone!

You will notice that npm is trying to install its packages to this path:

Missing write access to /usr/local/lib/node_modules

We need to change this to a better path that you have the rights to upate.

.npmrc update

using vim or nano update your local .npmrc file

vim ~/.npmrc

Update this file with the below, this will tell npm to install packages locally to .npm-packages

prefix=${HOME}/.npm-packages

NPM Global install success

Once you change the .npmrc file, you will begin to install packages to ~/.npm-packages. No more issues

https://media.codingcat.dev/image/upload/v1657636635/main-codingcatdev-photo/85977596-b94f-4bce-b13e-4dda85cdc944.jpg

NPM init defaults

If you start projects using npm often enough you will want to default some of the authoring items. The basic syntax is npm config set init.*

Don’t stress out if you are updating using npm config set while in a different directory this will still update in ~/.npmrc

npm config set init.author.name "Alex Patterson"
npm config set init.author.email "developer@ajonp.com"
npm config set init.author.url "https://ajonp.com/"
npm config set init.license "MIT"
npm config set init.version "0.0.1"

Now our full .npmrc will look like:

prefix=/Users/ajonp/.npm-packages init.author.name=Alex Patterson init.author.email=developer@ajonp.com init.author.url=https://ajonp.com/ init.license=MIT init.version=0.0.1

Executing npm init will produce the following just by hitting enter.

{
	"name": "npm-sample",
	"version": "0.0.1",
	"description": "Sample NPM",
	"main": "index.js",
	"scripts": {
		"test": "echo "Error: no test specified" && exit 1"
	},
	"author": "Alex Patterson <developer@ajonp.com> (https://ajonp.com/)",
	"license": "MIT"
}

Setting NPM registry

At work we have a VSTS (aka Visual Studio aka DevOps) private npm registry so it becomes important to use npm config set registry

https://<company>.pkgs.visualstudio.com/_packaging/<company>/npm/registry/

Which will result in updating .npmrc with

registry=https://<company>.pkgs.visualstudio.com/_packaging/<company>/npm/registry/

There is a great medium article on setting up VSTS npm.

Setting NPM loglevel

Probably my favorite setting of all is npm config set loglevel="warn", this allows me to see any output and only the warnings. There are several different levels in the npm docs, you execute any of them by running something like below:

npm i -g ionic -s --silent: --loglevel silent -q, --quiet: --loglevel warn -d: --loglevel info -dd, --verbose: --loglevel verbose -ddd: --loglevel silly