Announcing npm7

It's been a very long and crazy ride but I'm happy to share that the project I've been working so hard since I joined the npm team more than an year ago is finally out! npm7 is the new major version of the npm cli

TLDR; npm install -g npm@7

What's new?

First let's highlight the major additions:

• workspaces! finally the top-requested feature from our userbase makes its way into a stable release line
• auto-installing peer-dependencies again

Improving DX

There are some smaller changes/additions/tweaks that will hopefully continue to help improving the user experience, such as:

• new npm exec command - same as npx that now lives in the cli
• a new package-lock format and support to install from yarn.lock files
• improved npm audit output!
• new update notification system for the npm cli
• ability to install a git/GH pkg from a PR: npm i user/project#pull/123
• less verbose install output
• skip pre/post scripts when using --ignore-scripts
• new system to cache node_modules data that makes npm ls much faster
• npm ls now defaults to top-level deps only, to see the entire tree you can now run npm ls --all
• slightly improved npm fund output, highlighting funding urls and properly nesting deps
• And much, much more!

Clean up work

In reality npm7 is the long due refactor/clean up of the npm cli and it spawns a couple of very important internal packages to our ecosystem which are now the standard Programmatic APIs for npm:

• @npmcli/arborist the new npm install system
• @npmcli/config the new npm config
• @npmcli/run-script the new npm run
• @npmcli/map-workspaces read workspaces configs
• libnpmfund npm fund Programmatic API

I'm really excited to see what this will enable in the community, for the first time it's going to be a trivial thing to require('@npmcli/arborist') and have the same npm install experience from within userland scripts without the need of spawning any subprocesses

It's also worth mentioning that a lot of the work that went into this version is making sure every line of code and functionality is well-tested and stable so that we can better iterate on new features and bug fixes moving forward

More?

There are also new options/flags that goes along with some of the new features such as --legacy-peer-deps and --strict-peer-deps that help tweak the behavior of installing peer deps, npm ls --all to see all installed deps since the default is now show top-level only, etc

The team will be working hard on adding more tests and fixing any bugs that managed to slip through our beta test period Feel free to reach out to us in our GitHub issue tracker that now have the best up-to-date links on how to report bugs, propose new features or get help.

You can also read more about the release in the official channels:

• npm blog post
• GitHub blog post

Get it now

The npm7 is going to be a part of the upcoming node15 release but if you want to get it first, you can install it now with:

npm install -g npm@7

Happy dependency-installing everyone!