The npm blog has been discontinued.
Updates from the npm team are now published on the GitHub Blog and the GitHub Changelog.
a belated npm Weekly, #3
Hot off of last week’s presses, here’s the npm Weekly for January 29. You can also have it delivered to you.
What’s new in the CLI
We’ve bumped another minor version number in npm@2… up to 2.4.0 for npm@latest. The new feature that got us there is npm dist-tags. You can now remove tags from a package!
What’s coming in npm@3
npm has a command (npm dedupe) which simplifies the dependency tree. In npm@2, you have to run this command explicitly in order to dedupe your tree, but in npm@3 we plan to make this a default part of npm install.
The way it works is if two packages both depend on package foo and if they can use the same version of foo, then that version of foo will be downloaded and used by both. If npm dedupe isn’t used, then each package might get its own version of foo nested in its own dependency tree.
Tim Oxley brings up the good point that this can break your package.json scripts if you are incorrectly relying on executables being installed in node_modules/.bin. If you want to make sure you aren’t incorrectly hardcoding the directory structure into your scripts, Kate Hudson does a great job of explaining how it works and what you should be doing.
From the Community
If you’re trying to create a quick prototype using npm packages, then you might want to check out egghead.io’s video about setting up a mock backend with json-server. It’s a package that was “Created with <3 for front-end developers who need a flexible back-end for quick prototyping and mocking.”
Markdown for the People with marky-markdown
The READMEs that you see on package pages are getting cleaner and more readable with marky-markdown. Find out more about the work behind this new package in last week’s blog post from Zeke.
As part of the work on marky-markdown, Ben extended highlights, the syntax highligher used by the Atom text editor. Grammars can now be installed from npm modules.
Are we missing a language you’d like to see highlighted in your README? Simply publish the grammar to npm, and submit a patch to marky-markdown.