npm weekly, #20: npm 3 is here(-ish)!

This big news could have been waiting for you in your inbox if you were signed up for the weekly.

just hours away from npm@3!

The eagerly anticipated npm 3 will have an official npm release today (or early tomorrow morning, depending on your time zone).

A few things to note:

1. When you use the command npm install -g npm, it will still download npm@2 until we’ve moved npm@3 out of beta. You can download the beta using npm install -g npm@3.0-latest.
2. npm@3 is going to be in beta until we’re comfortable with its stability and the effect of the breaking changes on the community.
3. One of those breaking changes is the way peerDependencies works. If you have a module that uses peerDependencies, please make sure you understand the changes. We will be writing a blog post about this soon.

If you’re chomping at the bit to find out about all the changes and new features, you can check out the draft CHANGELOG.

moving towards better front-end support

npm is now the registry of choice for many front-end communities, but we still have a way to go before the front-end experience is seamless. We’ve talked about this before, and the changes to peerDependencies were a small step in that direction.

Forrest, the CLI team lead, will be updating the CLI roadmap to include plans for better support for front-end use cases over the next couple of major releases.

In the meantime, folks are playing around with ideas in userland. One that caught our eye recently was Aria Stewart’s copy-browser-modules. If you try it out, let us know how it works for you :)

bonus human

We had an avalanche of humans last week and promised another bonus human for this week. The bonus human has arrived! Chris Dickinson has joined the registry team. He’ll be spending some of his time tracking down issues in Node that affect the registry (& vice versa). He’ll also be helping us introduce npm private modules support for organizations and teams, which we’re very excited for, and continuing his Node.js contributions.

npm registry deep dive

If you’re interested in finding out more about the registry and how it works, you should check out CJ’s registry deep dive from NodeConf One-Shot Oslo a few weeks ago.