npm package discovery and stats viewer.

Discover Tips

  • General search

    [free text search, go nuts!]

  • Package details

    pkg:[package-name]

  • User packages

    @[username]

Sponsor

Optimize Toolset

I’ve always been into building performant and accessible sites, but lately I’ve been taking it extremely seriously. So much so that I’ve been building a tool to help me optimize and monitor the sites that I build to make sure that I’m making an attempt to offer the best experience to those who visit them. If you’re into performant, accessible and SEO friendly sites, you might like it too! You can check it out at Optimize Toolset.

About

Hi, 👋, I’m Ryan Hefner  and I built this site for me, and you! The goal of this site was to provide an easy way for me to check the stats on my npm packages, both for prioritizing issues and updates, and to give me a little kick in the pants to keep up on stuff.

As I was building it, I realized that I was actually using the tool to build the tool, and figured I might as well put this out there and hopefully others will find it to be a fast and useful way to search and browse npm packages as I have.

If you’re interested in other things I’m working on, follow me on Twitter or check out the open source projects I’ve been publishing on GitHub.

I am also working on a Twitter bot for this site to tweet the most popular, newest, random packages from npm. Please follow that account now and it will start sending out packages soon–ish.

Open Software & Tools

This site wouldn’t be possible without the immense generosity and tireless efforts from the people who make contributions to the world and share their work via open source initiatives. Thank you 🙏

© 2024 – Pkg Stats / Ryan Hefner

install-if-needed

v1.0.4

Published

installs the given modules if needed

Downloads

744

Readme

install-if-needed

stable

Installs the given list of modules and saves them into their respective fields in your nearest package.json. Dependencies that already exist in your package.json will be skipped.

var install = require('install-if-needed')

install({
  dependencies: ['through2'],
  devDependencies: ['[email protected]', 'standard']
}, function(err) {
  if (err)
    console.error("There was an error installing.")
})

You can pass { stdio: 'inherit' } to preserve logging and colors, acting like the usual npm install command.

Usage

NPM

install(opt[, cb])

Looks at package JSON and installs any of the specified dependencies that are not listed in their respective field.

  • cwd the directory for the closest package.json, (default process.cwd())
  • package optional package data, if not defined will search for closest package.json
  • save whether to --save, --save-dev and --save-optional (default true)
  • dependencies dependencies to install
  • devDependencies dev dependencies to install
  • optionalDependencies optional dependencies to install
  • command the command to spawn when installing, defaults to 'npm'

Other options are passed to spawn-npm-install.

On complete, cb is called with (err) status. All dependencies also accept a single string instead of an array.

Alternatively, opt can be a string or array, which is the same as listing it in dependencies.

//e.g.
//  npm install tape --save
install('tape', done)

Motivation

This helps build CLI tooling that auto-installs modules as needed. For example, a tool which stubs out an empty test file for tape:

#!/usr/bin/env node
var install = require('install-if-needed')
var fs = require('fs')
var template = fs.readFileSync(__dirname + '/template.js')

install({
  devDependencies: 'tape'
}, function(err) {
  if (err) throw err
  fs.writeFile(process.argv[2], template)
})

And the CLI might be as simple as:

quick-tape tests/simple.js

License

MIT, see LICENSE.md for details.