Speed up your development with npm init command

April 21, 2015

npm has a great command npm init which allows you to create package.json in a second!

npm init

Read the documentation for npm init and for package.json fields. Awesome tools come with great responsibility. Learn them!

init variables

Set it up! These init variables will be used everytime you run npm init and thus will save your time. Variables will be saved in .npmrc files.

npm set is an shorthand alias for cli command npm config set. As an example, this is how setting up looks like:

npm set init-author-email iamstarkov@gmail.com
npm set init-author-name Vladimir Starkov
npm set init-author-url https://iamstarkov.com/
npm set init-license MIT
npm set init-version 0.0.0

I prefer to use 0.0.0 init version; it lets me test the code in CI server before bumping the first major version.

GitHub shortcut expansion (user/repo)

When npm init will ask you about your git repository, type simply user/repo — npm is clever enough to expand the line into https://github.com/user/repo. npm will generate the repository, bugs, and homepage fields in this way:

"repository": {
  "type": "git",
  "url": "https://github.com/user/repo"
},
"bugs": {
  "url": "https://github.com/user/repo/issues"
},
"homepage": "https://github.com/user/repo#readme"

Use npm wisely, develop faster,
your npm-inited Vladimir Starkov