npm-http-server

npm-http-server is an HTTP server that serves files from npm packages.

Installation

Using npm:

$ npm install --save npm-http-server

Then, use as you would anything else:

// using an ES6 transpiler, like babel
import { createServer } from 'npm-http-server'

// not using an ES6 transpiler
var createServer = require('npm-http-server').createServer

Configuration and Usage

Use createServer to create a server instance, passing it the options it needs to connect to npm:

import { createServer } from 'npm-http-server'

const server = createServer({
  registryURL: 'https://registry.npmjs.org',  // The URL of the npm registry, defaults to the public registry
  bowerBundle: '/bower.zip',                  // A special pathname for generating Bower bundles, defaults to "/bower.zip"
  redirectTTL: 60,                            // The time (in seconds) to cache 302 responses, defaults to 0
  autoIndex: true                             // Set false to disable generating index pages for directories
})

server.listen(8080)

server is a standard node HTTP server.

If you'd like to use npm-http-server as part of a larger site, using e.g. a framework like express, you can use the createRequestHandler function directly. As its name suggests, this function returns another function that can be used as the request handler in a standard node HTTP server. This function accepts the same options as createServer.

import express from 'express'
import { createRequestHandler } from 'npm-http-server'

const app = express()
app.use(express.static('public'))
app.use(createRequestHandler())

// ...

URL Format

In npm-http-server, the URL is the API. The server recognizes URLs in the format /package@version/path/to/file where:

package         The @scope/name of an npm package (scope is optional)
version         The version, version range, or tag
/path/to/file   The path to a file in that package (optional, defaults to main module)

Bower Support

To get a Bower bundle from a package that supports it use the /bower.zip file path. The zip archive that Bower needs is created dynamically based on the config in bower.json. The archive contains bower.json and all files listed in its main section. For convenience, the version number is automatically replaced with the one from package.json so there is no need to manually update it.

Please note: We do NOT recommend JavaScript libraries use Bower. It was originally written to solve the problem of bundling CSS and other static assets together with JavaScript in a single package. However, that problem is much more ably solved by bundlers like webpack and Browserify at build time. Additionally, Bower requires JavaScript libraries to check their build into GitHub (see why this is bad) and publish to the Bower registry, both of which are extra overhead that can be avoided by publishing just the source to npm and using a postinstall script to generate the build.

Debugging

To enable debug console output, set DEBUG=npm-http-server in your environment.