The Issue With Global Node Packages

Node.js brought about a great revolution for JavaScript developers by allowing us to write code that runs directly on our machines; our skills were no longer limited to browsers alone. At first, many of us simply saw this as a way to write our application servers without needing to learn another language, but we all quickly caught on to the fact that we could also write tools for the command line that automate a lot of things in our development cycles.

npm, which is bundled with Node.js, made this even easier by giving us quick and easy access to tools that others have created, which we install on our machines to access from wherever we are in our system. JavaScript was finally a real programming language. But with these new capabilities came a lot of best practices that needed to be discovered, because there were many new scenarios that wouldnt be found in the browser. In particular, Id like to discuss a practice that has been on my mind a lot lately that I think much of the community needs to evaluate.

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