npm Blog (Archive)

The npm blog has been discontinued.

Updates from the npm team are now published on the GitHub Blog and the GitHub Changelog.

npm v7 Series - Introduction

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Quite a lot has happened in npm since our last update way back in 2019. We’re overdue for a status update on npm v7.

Despite some massive distracting changes (some unfortunate, some very fortunate), development work has been proceeding steadily.

Yesterday, Edward Thomson presented a demo of a few of the features coming in npm v7 at GitHub Satellite. The Q&A session was awesome, and it was clear that a lot of you are excited for this update to the npm CLI, and have a lot of questions that unfortunately couldn’t be adequately answered in such a short time.

This post started as a brief update on what we’ve been doing, intended to go live along with the talk, but it got long. So, instead, this is the first post, with more to come, where I take you all through some of the major changes coming in npm v7, the thinking and motivation behind them, and how they might affect you and your work.

Vision

npm v7 is based on a handful of technical and user experience principles, and each post in this series will tie back to one or more of these in some way.

If we know the right thing to do, let’s not yell at you to do it. Let’s just do it for you, and do it all the way the first time. That’s what npm loves you means. It means taking care of you and your project like a good and faithful assistant, only troubling you to get involved when absolutely necessary.

Coming Attractions

In the coming npm v7 posts, we’ll cover:

RFC Process

The npm CLI team has been running an open RFC process for the last several months now, and the impact on our development process has been great.

Usually, writing the code is the easy part. The hard part is all the thinking and talking that goes into making sure we’re writing code for a feature that users will benefit from, and that we’ve explored the edge cases well enough to be confident we’re not overlooking something important.

If you’re interested in getting involved with npm’s design process, we want you to participate! Building something like this is a team effort, and we all benefit from getting a broad range of perspectives from our community.

Is there something that you really wish npm would do, or do differently, or stop doing? Head over to npm/rfcs and give us a proposal. Obviously the more engaged and thorough you can be, the more easy it’ll be for us to get it done, but every great idea has to start somewhere, so don’t feel like you have to have all the answers before you begin :)

Thanks!

If there’s something you’d like to see covered around npm v7, you can post an issue on the npm/npm-v7-blog repo.

Stay tuned for more from us, and I hope these posts prove to be fun and informative!

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