If you ever installed an NPM package, the following syntax looks very familiar to you:
npm install --save package_name
This was long the golden standard to install a package and save it as a dependency in your project.
If we didn’t specify the --save flag, it would only get locally installed and not added to the package.json file.
NPM evolved
Over time NPM evolved into a huge player in package management, and ever since version 5 of NPM, we no longer need to define this --save argument.
Meaning our packages will be saved by default into our package.json file.
I’m thrilled with this addition, as it’s scarce to want to install a package that you don’t need in your package.json file.
Installing dev dependencies using NPM
We also used the following command to install a package as a dev dependency.
npm install --save-dev package_name
This will place the package in your dev dependencies in the package.json file.
So to recap, the standard install will install our package under the dependencies, while the --save-dev argument will place them under devDependencies.
{
"name": "my_project",
"version": "0.0.1",
"dependencies": {
"package_name": "^1.0.0",
},
"devDependencies": {
"package_dev_name": "^1.0.0",
}
}
NPM install additional flags
As we saw, the default install has no flags and will install our dependency. NPM, however, gives us some flags to control the options.
-P, ‘—save-prod`: Package will install as a dependency-D,--save-dev: Package will be installed as a dev dependency-O,--save-optional: Package will be installed as an optional dependency--no-save: Package won’t be saved in package.json file
These are the essential flags we can use. However, the only one you frequently use might be the -D flag.
Do keep in mind the letter flags are capital sensitive.
So to recap: we don’t need to use the --save attribute anymore. This is now the default behavior.
We can provide the -D flag to save a package as a dev dependency.
Thank you for reading this article. I hope you learned something new today. And thank you, NPM, for making this available.
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