Managing module dependencies

by kishore@kishorelive.com (Kishore Nallan)

at 2011-12-06 00:30:20

original http://howtonode.org/managing-module-dependencies

Following this discussion on the node.js mailing list about managing module dependencies, I thought it's worth sharing some pointers on that here.

Using NPM to bundle your module dependencies

If you're building an application that is dependent on a number of NPM modules, you can specify them in your package.json file this way:

"dependencies": {
  "express": "2.3.12",
  "jade": ">= 0.0.1",
  "redis":   "0.6.0"
}

By doing so, every time you checkout your project fresh, all you need to do to get your dependencies sorted out is:

$ npm install

Note that you can either require a specific version of a module, or a minimum version by prefixing the version number with >=.

Managing development dependencies

If you have development related dependencies (e.g. testing framework) which you do not wish to install in production, specify them using the devDependencies property:

"devDependencies": {
  "vows": ">= 0.4.x"
}

On production, using npm install --production will ensure that the development dependencies are not installed.

Managing private NPM modules

If you're working on a private module, you can also add "private": true to the package.json file to prevent yourself from accidentally publishing your module to the NPM registry.

Specifying a git repo as a dependency

Finally, if you want to host your module in a private git repository, but still want to bundle it as a dependency to a project, you can do that too:

"dependencies": {
    "secret-module": "git+ssh://git@github.com:username/secret-repo.git#v2.3"
}

The last part of the URL (v2.3) specifies which tag should be used. You can also specify a commit hash or a branch name.

This feature was added to the NPM only around mid August, so you will need a recent version of NPM for this to work. There are a lot more such nifty feature requests in the pipeline, so keep a watch out for them on NPM's Github repo.

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