It's only been a couple of days but we've got some bug fixes we wanted to get out to you all. We also believe that npx is ready to be bundled with npm, which we're really excited about!

npx!!!

npx is a tool intended to help round out the experience of using packages from the npm registry — the same way npm makes it super easy to install and manage dependencies hosted on the registry, npx is meant to make it easy to use CLI tools and other executables hosted on the registry. It greatly simplifies a number of things that, until now, required a bit of ceremony to do with plain npm.

@zkat has a great introduction post to npx that I highly recommend you give a read

• fb040bee0 #17685 Bundle npx with npm itself. (@zkat)

BUG FIXES

• 9fe905c39 #17652 Fix max callstack exceeded loops with trees with circular links. (@iarna)
• c0a289b1b #17606 Make sure that when write package.json and package-lock.json we always use unix path separators. (@Standard8)
• 1658b79ca #17654 Make npm outdated show results for globals again. Previously it never thought they were out of date. (@iarna)
• 06c154fd6 #17678 Stop flattening modules that have peer dependencies. We're making this change to support scenarios where the module requiring a peer dependency is flattened but the peer dependency itself is not, due to conflicts. In those cases the module requiring the peer dep can't be flattened past the location its peer dep was placed in. This initial fix is naive, never flattening peer deps, and we can look into doing something more sophisticated later on. (@iarna)
• 88aafee8b #17677 There was an issue where updating a flattened dependency would sometimes unflatten it. This only happened when the dependency had dependencies that in turn required the original dependency. (@iarna)
• b58ec8eab #17626 Integrators who were building their own copies of npm ran into issues because make install and https://npmjs.com/install.sh weren't aware that npm install creates links now when given a directory to work on. This does not impact folks installing npm with npm install -g npm. (@iarna)

DOC FIXES

• 10bef735e #17645 Fix some github issue links in the 5.1.0 changelog (@schmod)
• 85fa9dcb2 #17634 Fix typo in package-lock docs. (@sonicdoe)
• 688699bef #17628 Recommend that folks looking for support join us on https://package.community/ or message @npm_support on Twitter. (@strugee)