npm

This is just enough info to get you up and running.

More info available via man npm.

IMPORTANT

You need node v0.2.0 or higher to run this program.

You shouldn't use sudo with it.

Simple Install

To install npm, do this:

curl https://npmjs.org/install.sh | sh

If it dies with a "Permission Denied" or EACCESS error, then that probably means that you are running node in a shared root-owned location. You've got options.

Using sudo with npm is Very Not Recommended. Either chown the folder that is your node install prefix, or set up a .npmrc file pointing root, binroot, and manroot to folders that you own. (The .npmrc is just an ini-formatted file, so you can use any editor to do this.)

More Fancy Installing

First, get the code. Maybe use git for this. That'd be cool. Very fancy.

The default make target is install, which downloads the current stable version of npm, and installs that for you.

If you want to install the exact code that you're looking at, the bleeding-edge master branch, do this:

make dev

If you'd prefer to just symlink in the current code so you can hack on it, you can do this:

make link

If you check out the Makefile, you'll see that these are just running npm commands at the cli.js script directly. You can also use npm without ever installing it by using node cli.js instead of "npm". Set up an alias if you want, that's fine. (You'll still need read permission to the root/binroot/manroot folders, but at this point, you probably grok all that anyway.)

Uninstalling

So sad to see you go.

    npm uninstall npm

Or, if that fails,

    make uninstall

Install Problems

There's was an issue prior to npm version 0.2.0 where packages whose names contained hyphen characters would be odd.

If you've installed any packages with - in the name prior to 0.2.0, then you ought to remove and reinstall them.

More Docs

Check out the docs.

You can use the npm help command to read any of them.

If you're a developer, and you want to use npm to publish your program, you should read this