npm “weekly” #35: Orgs!, npm3 in Node 5, notes on LTS, improved docs

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Amazing! Private Packages Support For Organizations!

Since we launched Private Packages this spring, support for managing developer teams with varying permisisons and multiple projects has been — by far — the most requested feature improvement.

With help from inexhaustible beta testers, and after some isolated bumps during last week’s rollout, organizational support is here. For $7/dev/mo., enjoy easier management of viewing & publishing of an unlimited number of packages and control access to your own scope name. You also can add existing paid Private Packages users to your org for free.

We hope you’ll be as excited as we are, and definitely want your feedback and ideas about what comes next. Learn more more about Orgs here, sign up here, and get in touch.

You Won’t Believe It! Node 5 Has Shipped With npm 3!

What a month!

While we were out consuming all the Halloween candy and then all the Thanksgiving turkey and then the first week of advent-calendar chocolates, you probably noticed that Node 5 has been released, and it ships with npm 3!

Great news, but two important things to keep in mind:

1. When upgrading from 2 to 3, don’t overlook an important breaking change in the way peerDependencies works. There’s a great explanation of that change in our release notes, here. This is especially important if you maintain a grunt, gulp, or broccoli plug-in.

2. If you develop on Windows, you may not see the new version of npm when you upgrade, depending on how you have your PATH set up. Specifically, if npm’s global install path comes before the Node folder in PATH, and you’d previously upgraded npm yourself, you might find yourself contining to use the last version of npm you’d installed yourself.

For more info, don’t forget that all of the content in our CHANGELOG is super useful and awesome. And remember, if you’re really stuck, you can always email support@npmjs.com, tweet us at @npm_support, or find us on IRC at #npm on Freenode.

One Weird Note About Long-Term Support (LTS)!

Alongside the Node.js 5 release was the “re-awakening” of Node’s LTS strategy. (You can read about it at the Node.js LTS repo or in this post by Rod Vagg.)

This makes a fine time to remind you that npm have our own LTS strategy, designed to complement Node.js’s. npm@2 is included in Node.js 4 LTS Argon; therefore, this version of npm will continue to receive fixes for crashers and security issues — and support for new features on npm, Inc’s registry — for at least the next six months.

Also, if you’re still on Node 0.10 (why?): npm@1 is being deprecated soon and new versions of Node 0.10 LTS will be getting npm@2. Notes here.

We Went to Nodevember and You Won’t Believe What Happened Next!

Nodevember is still one of our favorite conferences and not just, but not not just, for the food. If you weren’t able to make it, you absolutely are too late for Jon Q’s special-edition stickers, but not too late to catch up on some of npm humans’ Nodevember talks:

• Rebecca walks through the design of a hypothetical simple package manager, “mnp”, and in the process explores where package managers get complicated and where npm has had challenges. Watch the video.
• Laurie provides a glimpse of npm’s own archtecture (the slide is entitled “shitshow”) to explain npm and Service Oriented Architecture: how we use SOA, and why Node is good at SOA. Check out his slides.
• Perhaps you’re interested in learning how to internationalize applicaitons of all sorts. Perhaps you should take a look at Aria’s Nuts and Bolts of Internationalization.

Tonic Links In Package Pages Will Change Your Life!

If you’ve ever browsed for packages and wished you had an effortless sandbox in which to test a few out, dig Tonic Dev, an npm-connected node REPL that allows you to simply require any package in our public registry.

We were fans when this first came out, and we’re so pleased with what this adds to the package discovery experience that we’ve added a link to Tonic to every package page. Just click the link in the right side panel and you’ll be dropped into a node REPL with your chosen package pre-added as the special ingredient.

Some Call It The Key To Happiness: Links In docs.npmjs.com Are Clickable Now!

You might have noticed that our cli reference docs just got a lot more “webby”. This is part of a strong push to make our documentation more accessible and usable. 1. Happy click-holing! 2. Substantial additional improvements to docs are coming, but for that we need your help. We love your email and tweets.

The Tutorial Video Everyone Should Watch!

Microsoft Virtual Academy published an awesomely thorough 2 hour (!) tutorial that takes you from zero to npm package hero. Mastering Node.js Modules and Packages with Visual Studio Code.

npm’s Newest Humans Will Restore Your Faith In Humanity!

Monica Garnica joins the sales team from the legal industry; in her free time she likes “checking out a movie or a new restaurant” (and therefore, presumably, also a new movie about a restaurant (!)).

Andrew Goode is based in Atlanta and hacked for 8 years in the telematics industry, but now he’s helping make npm On-Site as … goode as can be. (Sorry.)

Andrea Zodrow joins the sales team from Wind River Systems. In her off time she chases around her almost-2-year-old son Zach or watches “anything Marvel or zombie related.”

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