npm-shizzle

npm-shizzle is a wrapper around the npm binary that is installed on the system. Interaction with npm has never been easier as we support both async and sync API calls.

Installation

This module was designed for Node.js and can be installed from the public npm registry:

npm install --save npm-shizzle

Usage

In all of the following examples we assume that you've required the library as following:

'use strict';

var npm = require('npm-shizzle');

We export npm as a constructor but the API that we're using in examples allows chaining which results in more readable code. So to create a new npm instance you can do:

npm();

Or:

new npm();

The constructor does allow for a few optional arguments:

1. The directory that we have to operate in, should be an absolute path.
2. Options object which allows you to pre-configure some common npm cli flags:

• registry The npm registry you want to use
• username Your npm username
• password Your npm password

npm(__dirname, { registry: 'https://registry.nodejitsu.com' }).install('foo');

To install a module we can simply call the install method as illustrated above. We can pass in command line flags as arguments to the function:

npm().install('--global jslint');

As stated in the introduction text of this document we support both async and sync API's. To trigger the different modes you need to supply a completion callback as last argument if you want to use the async mode.

npm().install('--save modulename', function (err, output) {
  console.log(arguments);
});

If you are using sync functions and something bad happens we will throw an error.

API

The API methods depend on the npm binary that is installed on your system. We parse out npm -l command for available commands and introduce those in the prototype. Commands that contain a dash like run-script are also aliased with a camel case alternative so it can be used as runScript.

Debugging

This library is instrumented with the diagnostics so you can set the DIAGNOSTICS or DEBUG environment variable to DEBUG=npm-shizzle to receive the debug output of this module.

License

MIT