Design and Build Great Web APIs

Managing Your Project with npm

The Node Package Manager (npm) was created to help NodeJS developers manage the lifecycle of coding, building, testing, and installing a fully featured NodeJs application.^[29] It’s also designed to help developers manage the details of dependencies (other node packages used as part of a single application).

First released in 2010, npm was originally developed by Isaac Schlueter, who was inspired by similar language-specific module management tools like PEAR for PHP and CPAN for Perl. Since in this book we’ll be writing our code using NodeJS, npm (usually installed whenever you use common install scripts for NodeJS) is a logical choice for managing the modules and other related details of our API project.

However, ...