NPM Tricks I Wish I Knew Sooner
Recently I have been working on migrating an old React application based on react-scripts to support Node.js 18. To make it work, I came across multiple npm tricks that helped solve these issues, so I am going to explain and document them in this blog.
Dependencies Checks
npx depcheck
Analyzes the dependencies in a project to see how each dependency is used, which dependencies are unused, and which dependencies are missing from package.json.
Why Events
npm why package_name
This command helps you understand why a package is installed in your project and where it comes from.
Check Subdependencies
npm ls buffer
Prints all the versions of packages that are installed, as well as their dependencies.
Find Duplicates
npm find-dupes
Runs npm dedupe and outputs all the duplication changes without changing the package tree.
Reduce Duplication
npm dedupe
Searches the local packages tree and attempts to simplify the overall structure by moving dependencies further up the tree, where they can be more effectively shared by multiple dependent packages.
Clean Install
npm ci
If you have already set up projects where you have node_modules and package-lock.json, using this command will remove them and perform a clean install.
