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v3.7.2 (2016-02-04):

This week, the CLI team has been busy working on rewriting tests to support getting coverage reports going and running all of our tests on Windows. Meanwhile, we've got a bunch of dependency updates and one or two other things.

TESTS WENT INTO HIDING

Last week we took a patch from @substack to stop the installer from reordering arrays in an installed module's package.json... but somehow I dropped the test when I was rebasing.

  • 21b9271 #10063 Restore test that verifies that we don't re-order arrays in a module's package.json on install. (@substack)

DOCUMENTATION FIXES

  • c67521d #11348 Improve the documentation around which files are ALWAYS included in published packages and which are ALWAYS excluded. (@jscissr)
  • 7ef6793 #11348 The release date on the 3.7.0 changelog entry was wrong. I honestly don't know how I keep doing this. =D (@rafek)

DEPENDENCY UPDATES

  • 8a3c80c graceful-fs@4.1.3: Fix a bug where close wasn't getting made graceful. (@isaacs)

lodash saw updates across most of its modules this week with browser campatibility fixes that don't really impact us.

v3.7.1 (2016-02-01):

Super quick Monday patch on last week's release.

If you ever wondered why we release things to the npm@next tag for a week before promoting them to npm@latest, this is it!

RELEASE TRAIN VINDICATED (again)

  • adcaf04 #11349 Revert last weeks change to use JSON clone instead of lodash.cloneDeep. (@iarna)

v3.7.0 (2016-01-29):

Hi all! This week brings us some important performance improvements, support for git submodules(!) and a bunch of bug fixes.

PERFORMANCE

gauge, the module responsible for drawing npm's progress bars, had an embarrassing bug in its debounce implementation that resulted in it, on many systems, actually being slower than if it hadn't been debouncing. This was due to it destroying and then creating a timer object any time it got an update while waiting on its minimum update period to elapse. This only was a measurable slowdown when sending thousands of updates a second, but unfortunately parts of npm's logging do exactly that. This has been patched to eliminate that churn, and our testing shows the progress bar as being eliminated as a source of slow down.

Meanwhile, are-we-there-yet is the module that tracks just how complete our big asynchronous install process is. @STRML spent some time auditing its source and made a few smaller performance improvements to it. Most impactful was eliminating a bizarre bit of code that was both binding to AND closing over the current object. I don't have any explanation for how that crept in. =D

  • c680fa9 npmlog@2.0.2: New are-we-there-yet with performance patches from @STRML. New gauge with timer churn performance patch. (@iarna)

We were also using lodash's cloneDeep on package.json data which is definitely overkill, seeing as package.json data has all the restrictions of being json. The fix for this is just swapping that out for something that does a pair of JSON.stringify/JSON.parse, which is distinctly more speedy.

NEW FEATURE: GIT SUBMODULE SUPPORT

Long, long requested– the referenced issue is from 2011– we're finally getting rudimentary git submodule support.

  • 39dea9c #1876 Add support for git submodules in git remotes. This is a fairly simple approach, which does not leverage the git caching mechanism to cache submodules. It also doesn't provide a means to disable automatic initialization, e.g. via a setting in the .gitmodules file. (@gagern)

ROBUSTNESS

  • 5dec02a #10347 There is an obscure feature that lets you monkey-patch npm when it starts up. If the module being required with this feature failed, it would previously just make npm error out– this reduces that to a warning. (@evanlucas)

BUG FIXES

  • 9ab8b8d #10820 Fix a bug with npm ls where if you asked for ONLY production dependencies in output it would exclude dependencies that were BOTH production AND development dependencies. (@davidvgalbraith)
  • 6803fed #8982 Fix a bug where, under some circumstances, if you had a path that contained the name of a package being installed somewhere in it, npm would incorrectly refuse to run lifecycle scripts. (@elvanja)
  • 3eae40b #9253 Fix a bug where, when running lifecycle scripts, if the Node.js binary you ran npm with wasn't in your PATH, npm wouldn't use it to run your scripts. (@segrey)
  • 61daa6a #11014 Fix a bug where running rimraf node_modules/<package> followed by npm rm --save <package> would fail. npm now correctly removes the module from your package.json even though it doesn't exist on disk. (@davidvgalbraith)
  • a605586 #9679 Fix a bug where npm install --save git+https://… would save a https:// url to your package.json which was a problem because npm wouldn't then know that it was a git repo. (@gagern)
  • bbdc700 #10063 Fix a bug where npm would change the order of array properties in the package.json files of dependencies. npm adds a bunch of stuff to package.json files in your node_modules folder for debugging and bookkeeping purposes. As a part of this process it sorts the object to reduce file churn when it does updates. This fixes a bug where the arrays in the object were also getting sorted. This wasn't a problem for properties that npm itself maintains, but is a problem for properties used by other packages. (@substack)

DOCS IMPROVEMENTS

  • 2609a29 #11273 Include an example of viewing package version history in the npm view documentation. (@vedatmahir)
  • 719ea9c #11272 Fix typographical issue in npm update documentation. (@jonathanp)
  • cb9df5a #11215 Do not call SEE LICENSE IN <filename> an SPDX expression, as it's not. (@kemitchell)
  • f427934 #11196 Correct the package.json examples in the npm update documentation to actually be valid JSON and not just JavaScript object literals. (@s100)

DEPENDENCY UPDATES

  • a7b2407 retry@0.9.0: New features and interface agnostic refactoring. (@tim-kos)
  • 220fc77 request@2.69.0: A bunch of small bug fixes and module updates. (@simov)
  • 9e5c84f which@1.2.4: Update isexe and fix bug in pathExt, in which files without extensions would sometimes be preferred to files with extensions on Windows, even though those without extensions aren't executable. pathExt is a list of extensions that are considered executable (exe, cmd, bat, com on Windows). (@isaacs)
  • 375b9c4 rimraf@2.5.1: Minor doc formatting fixes. (@isaacs)
  • ef1971e lodash.clonedeep@4.0.2: Misc minor code cleanup. No functional changes. (@jdalton)

v3.6.0 (2016-01-20):

Hi all! This is a bigger release, in part 'cause we didn't have one last week. The most important thing you need to know is that when npm@3.6.0 replaces npm@3.5.4 as next, npm@3.5.4 WILL NOT be moved on to latest. This is due to a packaging error that tickles bugs in some earlier releases and makes upgrades to it from those versions break the install.

NEW FEATURES‼

  • ff504d4 #8752 In npm outdated, report symlinked packages as having a wanted & latest version of linked. (@halhenke)

  • f44d8c9 #10775 Add a success message to adduser / login. (@ekmartin)

  • 3109303 #10043 Warn if you try to use npm run x if you don't have a node_modules folder, since whatever you're trying to do probably won't work. (@timkrins)

  • 9ed2849 e9f1ad8 f10d300 8b593d8 #10717 npm version can now take a from-git argument, which instructs npm to read the version from git and update your package.json to what it finds. This is in contrast to its normal use where npm tells git about your new version. (@ekmartin)

3.5.4 WAS NOT SO GREAT

The npm@3.5.4 package was missing some dependencies. Specifically, glob and has-unicode had major release updates which meant that subdeps that relied on older major versions couldn't use the npm supplied versions any more, and so they needed their own copies.

This went undetected because the actions necessary to run the tests (which check for this sort of thing) resolved the missing modules.

Further, it didn't have symptoms when upgrading from most versions of npm. Unfortunately, some versions had bugs that were tickled by this and resulted in broken upgrades, most notably, npm@3.3.12, the version that's been in Node.js 5.

WHEN MISSING PATHS ARE OK

  • bb638fa #11212 When trying to determine if a file was controlled by npm before going to remove it, we check to see if it is inside any of a list of paths that npm considers to be under its control. Not all of those paths always exist (and that's ok!) Previously we were calling it a failure to match if ANY of them didn't exist. We now only do so if NONE of them exist. If some do, then we do our usual checks on them.

    This showed up as an error where you would see something like:

    npm warn gentlyRm not removing /path/to/thing as it wasn't installed by /path/to/other/thing

    But it totally was installed by it. (@iarna)

BETTER NODE PRE-RELEASE SUPPORT

Historically, if you used a pre-release version of Node.js, you would get dozens and dozens of warnings when EVERY engine check failed across all of your modules, because >= 0.10.0 doesn't match prereleases.

You might find this stream of redundent warnings undesirable. I do.

We've moved this into a SINGLE warning you'll get about using a pre-release version of Node.js and now suppress those other warnings.

  • 6952f79 #11212 Engine check warnings are now issued along with any other warnings about your tree, instead of emitting in the middle of your install (and then disappearing behind the giant tree of stuff installed). (@iarna)
  • ee2ebe9 #11212 Suppress engine verification warnings about pre-release versions of Node.js. (@iarna)
  • 135b7e0 #11212 Explicitly warn, in only one place, if you are using a pre-release version of Node.js. (@iarna)

BUG FIXES

  • ea331c8 #10938 When removing a package, sometimes the node_modules/.bin wouldn't be cleaned up entirely. This would result in package folders that contained only a node_modules/.bin directory. In turn, this would result in npm ls and other tools complaining about these broken directories. To fix this, the unbuild step now explicitly deletes the node_modules/.bin folder as its final step. (@chrisirhc)
  • 00720db #11158 On windows, the node-gyp wrapper would fail if your path to node-gyp contained spaces. This fixes that problem by quoting use of that path. (@orangemocha)
  • 69ac933 #11142 Fix a race condition when making directories in the cache, which could lead to ENOENT failures. (@Jimbly)
  • e982858 #9696 When replacing the package.json in the cache you sometimes see EPERM errors on Windows that you wouldn't on Unix-like operating systems. This ignores those errors and allows Windows to continue. Longer term, we'll be adding something to retry these errors, but ultimately fail if there really is an ongoing permissions issue. (@orangemocha)

DOC CHANGES

DEPENDENCY UPDATES

v3.5.4 (2016-01-07):

I hope you all had fantastic winter holidays, if it's winter where you are and if there are holidays‼ We went a few weeks without releases because staff was taking time away from work here and there. A new year has come and we're back now, and refreshed and ready to dig in!

This week brings us a bunch of documentation improvements and some module updates. The core team's focus continues to be on improving tests, particularly with Windows, so there's not too much to call out here.

DOCUMENTATION IMPROVEMENTS

  • 6b0031e #11044 Correct documentation regarding the defaults for the color config option. (@scottaddie)
  • c6ce69e #10990 Drop mentions in documentation of process.installPrefix, as it hasn't been a thing since Node.js 0.6 and we don't support that. (@jeffmcmahan)
  • dee92d1 #11037 Clarify the documentation on the max length of the name property in package.json files. (@scottaddie)
  • 4b9d7bb #10787 Make the formatting in the documentation for npm dist-tag more consistent with other docs. (@cvrebert)
  • 7f77a80 #10787 Add documentation to the npm dist-tag docs that explains in greater detail how latest is different than other tags. Further, improve the documentation with better examples. Add a discussion of common practice for using dist tags to manage alpha's and beta's. (@cvrebert)
  • 6db58dd 2ee6371 #10788 #10789 Improve documentation cross referencing. (@cvrebert)
  • 7ba629a #10790 Document more clearly that npm install foo means npm install foo@latest. (@cvrebert)

A FEW MODULE UPDATES

  • fc2e8d5 glob@6.0.3: Remove deprecated features and fix a bunch of bugs. (@isaacs)
  • 5b820c4 has-unicode@2.0.0: Change the default on windows to be false, as international windows installs often install to non-unicode codepages and there's no way to detect this short of a system call or a call to a command line program. (@iarna)
  • 238fe84 which@1.2.1: Fixed bugs with uid/gid checks and with quoted windows PATH parts. (@isaacs)
  • 5e510e1 rimraf@2.5.0: Add ability to disable glob support / pass in options. (@isaacs)
  • 7558215 readable-stream@2.0.5: Minor performance improvements. (@calvinmetcalf)
  • 64e8499 fs-write-stream-atomic@1.0.8: Rewrite to use modern streams even on 0.8 plus a bunch of tests. (@iarna)
  • 74d92a0 columnify@1.5.4: Some bug fixes around large inputs. (@timoxley)

FIX NPM'S TESTS ON 0.8

This doesn't impact you as a user of npm, and ordinarily that means we wouldn't call it out here, but if you've ever wanted to contribute, having that green travis badge makes it a lot easier to do so with confidence!

  • b14cdbb #10872 Rewrite tests using nock to use other alternatives. (@zkat)

  • 59ed01a #10872 Work around Node.js 0.8 http back-pressure bug.

    0.8 http streams have a bug, where if they're paused with data in their buffers when the socket closes, they call end before emptying those buffers, which results in the entire pipeline ending and thus the point that applied backpressure never being able to trigger a resume.

    We work around this by piping into a pass through stream that has unlimited buffering. The pass through stream is from readable-stream and is thus a current streams3 implementation that is free of these bugs even on 0.8. (@iarna)

v3.5.3 (2015-12-10):

Did you know that Bob Ross reached the rank of master sergeant in the US Air Force before becoming perhaps the most soothing painter of all time?

TWO HAPPY LITTLE BUG FIXES

  • 71c9590 #10505 npm ls --json --depth=0 now respects the depth parameter, when it is zero and when it is not zero. (@MarkReeder)
  • 954fa67 #9099 I had always thought you could run npm version from subdirectories in your project, which is great, because now you can. I guess I was just ahead of my time. (@ekmartin)

NOW PAINT IN SOME NICE DOCS CHANGES

  • b88c37c #10546 Goodbye, FAQ! You were cheeky and fun until you weren't! Don't worry: npm still loves everyone, especially you! (@ashleygwilliams)
  • 2d3afe9 #10570 Update documentation URLs to be HTTPS everywhere sensible. No HTTP shall be spared! (@rsp)
  • 6abd0e0 #10650 Correctly note that there are two lifecycle scripts run by an install phase in an example, instead of three. (@eymengunay)
  • a5e8df5 #10687 npm outdated's output can be a little puzzling sometimes. I've attempted to make it clearer, with some examples, of what's going on with "wanted" and "latest" in more cases. (@othiym23)
  • 8f52833 #10700 Hey, do you remember when search.npmjs.org was a thing? I think I do? The last time I used it was in like 2012, and it's gone now, so remove it from the docs. (@gagern)
  • b6a53b8 npm/docs#477 Continue to airbrush the CLI API docs out of history. (@verpixelt)
  • b835b72 semver@5.1.0: Include BNF for SemVer expression grammar (which is also now included in npm help semver). (@isaacs)

LAND YOUR DEPENDENCY UPGRADES IN PAIRS SO EVERYONE HAS A FRIEND

v3.5.2 (2015-12-03):

Weeeelcome to another npm release! The short version is that we fixed some ENOENT and some modules that resulted in modules going missing. We also eliminated the use of MD5 in our code base to help folks using Node.js in FIPS mode. And we fixed a bad URL in our license file.

FIX URL IN LICENSE

The license incorrectly identified the registry URL as registry.npmjs.com and this has been corrected to registry.npmjs.org.

ENOENT? MORE LIKE ENOMOREBUGS

The headliner this week was uncovered by the fixes to bundled dependency handling over the past few releases. What had been a frustratingly intermittent and hard to reproduce bug became something that happened every time in Travis. This fixes another whole bunch of errors where you would, while running an install have it crash with an ENOENT on rename, or the install would finish but some modules would be mysteriously missing and you'd have to install a second time.

What's going on was a bit involved, so bear with me:

npm@3 generates a list of actions to take against the tree on disk. With the exception of lifecycle scripts, it expects these all to be able to act independently without interfering with each other.

This means, for instance, that one should be able to upgrade b in a→b→c without having npm reinstall c.

That works fine by the way.

But it also means that the move action should be able to move b in a→b→c@1.0.1 to a→d→b→c@1.0.2 without moving or removing c@1.0.1 and while leaving c@1.0.2 in place if it was already installed.

That is, the move action moves an individual node, replacing itself with an empty spot if it had children. This is not, as it might first appear, something where you move an entire branch to another location on the tree.

When moving b we already took care to leave c@1.0.1 in place so that other moves (or removes) could handle it, but we were stomping on the destination and so c@1.0.2 was being removed.

There was also a bug with remove where it was pruning the entire tree at the remove point, prior to running moves and adds.

This was fine most of the time, but if we were moving one of the deps out from inside it, kaboom.

  • 19c626d #10655 Get rid of the remove commit phase– we could have it prune just the module being removed, but that isn't gaining us anything. (@iarna)

After all that, we shouldn't be upgrading the add of a bundled package to a move. Moves save us from having to extract the package, but with a bundled dependency it's included in another package already so that doesn't gain us anything.

While I was in there, I also took some time to improve diagnostics to make this sort of thing easier to track down in the future:

NO MORE MD5

We updated modules that had been using MD5 for non-security purposes. While this is perfectly safe, if you compile Node in FIPS-compliance mode it will explode if you try to use MD5. We've replaced MD5 with Murmur, which conveys our intent better and is faster to boot.

DEPENDENCY UPDATES

v3.5.1 (2015-11-25):

THE npm CLI !== THE npm REGISTRY !== npm, INC.

npm-the-CLI is licensed under the terms of the Artistic License 2.0, which is a liberal open-source license that allows you to take this code and do pretty much whatever you like with it (that is, of course, not legal language, and if you're doing anything with npm that leaves you in doubt about your legal rights, please seek the review of qualified counsel, which is to say, not members of the CLI team, none of whom have passed the bar, to my knowledge). At the same time the primary registry the CLI uses when looking up and downloading packages is a commercial service run by npm, Inc., and it has its own Terms of Use.

Aside from clarifying the terms of use (and trying to make sure they're more widely known), the only recent changes to npm's licenses have been making the split between the CLI and registry clearer. You are still free to do whatever you like with the CLI's source, and you are free to view, download, and publish packages to and from registry.npmjs.org, but now the existing terms under which you can do so are more clearly documented. Aside from the two commits below, see also the release notes for npm@3.4.1, which is where the split between the CLI's code and the terms of use for the registry was first made more clear.

  • 35a5dd5 #10532 Clarify that registry.npmjs.org is the default, but that you're free to use the npm CLI with whatever registry you wish. (@kemitchell)
  • fa6b013 #10532 Having semi-duplicate release information in README.md was confusing and potentially inaccurate, so remove it. (@kemitchell)

EASE UP ON WINDOWS BASH USERS

It turns out that a fair number of us use bash on Windows (through MINGW or bundled with Git, plz – Cygwin is still a bridge too far, for both npm and Node.js). @jakub-g did us all a favor and relaxed the check for npm completion to support MINGW bash. Thanks, Jakub!

THE ONGOING SAGA OF BUNDLED DEPENDENCIES

npm@3.5.0 fixed up a serious issue with how npm@3.4.1 (and potentially npm@3.4.0 and npm@3.3.12) handled the case in which dependencies bundled into a package tarball are handled improperly when one or more of their own dependencies are older than what's latest on the registry. Unfortunately, in fixing that (quite severe) regression (see npm@3.5.0's release notes' for details), we introduced a new (small, and fortunately cosmetic) issue where npm superfluously warns you about bundled dependencies being stale. We have now fixed that, and hope that we haven't introduced any other regressions in the process. :D

  • 20824a7 #10501 Only warn about replacing bundled dependencies when actually doing so. (@iarna)

MAKE NODE-GYP A LITTLE BLUER

  • 1d14d88 node-gyp@3.2.0: Support AIX, use which to find Python, updated to a newer version of gyp, and more! (@bnoordhuis)

A BOUNTEOUS THANKSGIVING CORNUCOPIA OF DOC TWEAKS

These are great! Keep them coming! Sorry for letting them pile up so deep, everybody. Also, a belated Thanksgiving to our Canadian friends, and a happy Thanksgiving to all our friends in the USA.

v3.5.0 (2015-11-19):

TEEN ORCS AT THE GATES

This week heralds the general release of the primary npm registry's new support for private packages for organizations. For many potential users, it's the missing piece needed to make it easy for you to move your organization's private work onto npm. And now it's here! The functionality to support it has been in place in the CLI for a while now, thanks to @zkat's hard work.

During our final testing before the release, our ace support team member @snopeks noticed that there had been some drift between the CLI team's implementation and what npm was actually preparing to ship. In the interests of everyone having a smooth experience with this extremely useful new feature, we quickly made a few changes to square up the CLI and the web site experiences.

NON-OPTIONAL INSTALLS, DEFINITELY NON-OPTIONAL

  • 180263b #10465 When a non-optional dep fails, we check to see if it's only required by ONLY optional dependencies. If it is, we make it fail all the deps in that chain (and roll them back). If it isn't then we give an error.

    We do this by walking up through all of our ancestors until we either hit an optional dependency or the top of the tree. If we hit the top, we know to give the error.

    If you installed a module by hand but didn't --save it, your module won't have the top of the tree as an anscestor and so this code was failing to abort the install with an error

    This updates the logic so that hitting the top OR a module that was requested by the user will trigger the error message. (@iarna)

  • b726a0e #9204 Ideally we would like warnings about your install to come AFTER the output from your compile steps or the giant tree of installed modules.

    To that end, we've moved warnings about failed optional deps to the show after your install completes. (@iarna)

OVERRIDING BUNDLING

  • aed71fb #10482 We've been in our bundled modules code a lot lately, and our last go at this introduced a new bug, where if you had a module a that bundled a module b, which in turn required c, and the version of c that got bundled wasn't compatible with b's package.json, we would then install a compatible version of c, but also erase b at the same time.

    This fixes that. It also reworks our bundled module support to be much closer to being in line with how we handle non-bundled modules and we're hopeful this will reduce any future errors around them. The new structure is hopefully much easier to reason about anyway. (@iarna)

A BRIEF NOTE ON NPM'S BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY

We don't often have much to say about the changes we make to our internal testing and tooling, but I'm going to take this opportunity to reiterate that npm tries hard to maintain compatibility with a wide variety of Node versions. As this change shows, we want to ensure that npm works the same across:

  • Node.js 0.8
  • Node.js 0.10
  • Node.js 0.12
  • the latest io.js release
  • Node.js 4 LTS
  • Node.js 5

Contributors who send us pull requests often notice that it's very rare that our tests pass across all of those versions (ironically, almost entirely due to the packages we use for testing instead of any issues within npm itself). We're currently beginning an effort, lasting the rest of 2015, to clean up our test suite, and not only get it passing on all of the above versions of Node.js, but working solidly on Windows as well. This is a compounding form of technical debt that we're finally paying down, and our hope is that cleaning up the tests will produce a more robust CLI that's a lot easier to write patches for.

0.8 + npm <1.4 COMPATIBLE? SURE WHY NOT

Hey, you found the feature we added!

  • 231c58a #10337 Add two new flags, first --legacy-bundling which installs your dependencies such that if you bundle those dependencies, npm versions prior to 1.4 can still install them. This eliminates all automatic deduping.

    Second, --global-style which will install modules in your node_modules folder with the same layout as global modules. Only your direct dependencies will show in node_modules and everything they depend on will be flattened in their node_modules folders. This obviously will elminate some deduping. (@iarna)

TYPOS IN THE LICENSE, OH MY

v3.4.1 (2015-11-12):

ASK FOR NOTHING, GET LATEST

When you run npm install foo, you probably expect that you'll get the latest version of foo, whatever that is. And good news! That's what this change makes it do.

We think this is what everyone wants, but if this causes problems for you, we want to know! If it proves problematic for people we will consider reverting it (preferrably before this becomes npm@latest).

Previously, when you ran npm install foo we would act as if you typed npm install foo@*. Now, like any range-type specifier, in addition to matching the range, it would also have to be <= the value of the latest dist-tag. Further, it would exclude prerelease versions from the list of versions considered for a match.

This worked as expected most of the time, unless your latest was a prerelease version, in which case that version wouldn't be used, to everyone's surprise. Worse, if all your versions were prerelease versions it would just refuse to install anything. (We fixed that in npm@3.2.2 with e4a38080.)

  • 1e834c2 #10189 npm-package-arg@4.1.0 Change the default version from * to latest. (@zkat)

BUGS

  • bec4a84 #10338 Failed installs could result in more rollback (removal of just installed packages) than we intended. This bug was first introduced by 83975520. (@iarna)
  • 06c732f #10338 Updating a module could result in the module stealing some of its dependencies from the top level, potentially breaking other modules or resulting in many redundent installations. This bug was first introduced by 971fd47a. (@iarna)
  • 5653366 #9980 npm, when removing a module, would refuse to remove the symlinked binaries if the module itself was symlinked as well. npm goes to some effort to ensure that it doesn't remove things that aren't is, and this code was being too conservative. This code has been rewritten to be easier to follow and to be unit-testable. (@iarna)

LICENSE CLARIFICATION

CLOSER TO GREEN TRAVIS

  • fc12da9 #10232 nock@1.9.0 Downgrade nock to a version that doesn't depend on streams2 in core so that more of our tests can pass in 0.8. (@iarna)

v3.4.0 (2015-11-05):

A NEW FEATURE

This was a group effort, with @isaacs dropping the implementation in back in August. Then, a few days ago, @ashleygwilliams wrote up docs and just today @othiym23 wrote a test.

It's a handy shortcut to update a dependency and then make sure tests still pass.

This new command:

npm install-test x

is the equivalent of running:

npm install x && npm test

BUG FIXES VIA DEPENDENCY UPDATES

  • 31c0080 #8640 npm/normalize-package-data#69 normalize-package-data@2.3.5: Fix a bug where if you didn't specify the name of a scoped module's binary, it would install it such that it was impossible to call it. (@iarna)
  • 02b37bc npm/fstream-npm#14 fstream-npm@1.0.7: Only filter config.gypi when it's in the build directory. (@mscdex)
  • accb9d2 npm/fstream-npm#15 fstream-npm@1.0.6: Stop including directories that happened to have names matching whitelisted npm files in npm module tarballs. The most common cause was that if you had a README directory then everything in it would be included if wanted it or not. (@taion)

DOCUMENTATION FIXES

DEPENDENCY UPDATES FOR THEIR OWN SAKE

v3.3.12 (2015-11-02):

Hi, a little hot-fix release for a bug introduced in 3.3.11. The ENOENT fix last week (f0e2088) broke upgrades of modules that have bundled dependencies (like npm, augh!)

  • aedf7cf #10192 If a bundled module is going to be replacing a module that's currently on disk (for instance, when you upgrade a module that includes bundled dependencies) we want to select the version from the bundle in preference over the one that was there previously. (@iarna)

v3.3.11 (2015-10-29):

This is a dependency update week, so that means no PRs from our lovely users. Look for those next week. As it happens, the dependencies updated were just devdeps, so nothing for you all to worry about.

But the bug fixes, oh geez, I tracked down some really long standing stuff this week!! The headliner is those intermittent ENOENT errors that no one could reproduce consistently? I think they're nailed! But also pretty important, the bug where hapi would install w/ a dep missing? Squashed!

EEEEEEENOENT

  • f0e2088 #10026 Eliminate some, if not many, of the ENOENT errors npm@3 has seen over the past few months. This was happening when npm would, in its own mind, correct a bundled dependency, due to a package.json specifying an incompatible version. Then, when npm extracted the bundled version, what was on disk didn't match its mind and… well, when it tried to act on what was in its mind, we got an ENOENT because it didn't actually exist on disk. (@iarna)

PARTIAL SHRINKWRAPS, NO LONGER A BAD DAY

  • 712fd9c #10153 Imagine that you have a module, let's call it fun-time, and it depends on two dependencies, need-fun@1 and need-time. Further, need-time requires need-fun@2. So after install the logical tree will look like this:

    fun-time
├── need-fun@1
└── need-time
    └── need-fun@2

    Now, the fun-time author also distributes a shrinkwrap, but it only includes the need-fun@1 in it.

    Resolving dependencies would look something like this:

    1. Require need-fun@1: Use version from shrinkwrap (ignoring version)
    2. Require need-time: User version in package.json
    3. Require need-fun@2: Use version from shrinkwrap, which oh hey, is already installed at the top level, so no further action is needed.

    Which results in this tree:

    fun-time
├── need-fun@1
└── need-time

    We're ignoring the version check on things specified in the shrinkwrap so that you can override the version that will be installed. This is because you may want to use a different version than is specified by your dependencies' dependencies' package.json files.

    To fix this, we now only allow overrides of a dependency version when that dependency is a child (in the tree) of the thing that requires it. This means that when we're looking for need-fun@2 we'll see need-fun@1 and reject it because, although it's from a shrinkwrap, it's parent is fun-time and the package doing the requiring is need-time.

    (@iarna)

STRING package.bin AND NON-NPMJS REGISTRIES

  • 3de1463 #9187 If you were using a module with the bin field in your package.json set to a string on a non-npmjs registry then npm would crash, due to the our expectation that the bin field would be an object. We now pass all package.json data through a routine that normalizes the format, including the bin field. (This is the same routine that your package.json is passed through when read off of disk or sent to the registry for publication.) Doing this also ensures that older modules on npm's own registry will be treated exactly the same as new ones. (In the past we weren't always super careful about scrubbing package.json data on publish. And even when we were, those rules have subtly changed over time.) (@iarna)

v3.3.10 (2015-10-22):

Hey you all! Welcome to a busy bug fix and PR week. We've got changes to how npm install replaces dependencies during updates, improvements to shrinkwrap behavior, and all sorts of doc updates.

In other news, npm@3 landed in node master in preparation for node@5 with 41923c0.

UPDATED DEPS NOW MAKE MORE SENSE

  • 971fd47 #9929 Make the tree more consistent by doing updates in place. This means that trees after a dependency version update will more often look the same as after a fresh install. (@iarna)

SHRINKWRAP + DEV DEPS NOW RESPECTED

  • eb28a8c #9647 If a shrinkwrap already has dev deps, don't throw them away when someone later runs npm install --save. (@iarna)

FANTASTIC DOCUMENTATION UPDATES

NEW STANDARD HAS ALWAYS BEEN STANDARD

  • 40c1b0f #9954 Update to standard@5 and reformat the source to work with it. (@cbas)

v3.3.9 (2015-10-15):

This week sees a few small changes ready to land:

TRAVIS NODE 0.8 BUILDS REJOICE

  • 25a234b #9668 Install npm@3's bundled dependencies with npm@2, so that the ancient npm that ships with node 0.8 can install npm@3 directly. (@othiym23)

SMALL ERROR MESSAGE IMPROVEMENT

  • a332f61 #9927 Update error messages where we report a list of versions that you could have installed to show this as a comma separated list instead of as JSON. (@iarna)

DEPENDENCY UPDATES

v3.3.8 (2015-10-12):

This is a small update release, we're reverting 22a3af0 from last week's release, as it is resulting in crashes. We'll revisit this PR during this week.

  • ddde1d5 Revert "lifecycle: Swap out custom logic with add-to-path module" (@iarna)

v3.3.7 (2015-10-08):

So, as Kat mentioned in last week's 2.x release, we're now swapping weeks between accepting PRs and doing dependency updates, in an effort to keep release management work from taking over our lives. This week is a PR week, so we've got a bunch of goodies for you.

Relatedly, this week means 3.3.6 is now latest and it is WAY faster than previous 3.x releases. Give it or this a look!

OPTIONAL DEPS, MORE OPTIONAL

  • 2289234 #9643 #9664 npm@3 was triggering npm@2's build mechanics when it was linking bin files into the tree. This was originally intended to trigger rebuilds of bundled modules, but npm@3's flat module structure confused it. This caused two seemingly unrelated issues. First, failing optional dependencies could under some circumstances (if they were built during this phase) trigger a full build failure. And second, rebuilds were being triggered of already installed modules, again, in some circumstances. Both of these are fixed by disabling the npm@2 mechanics and adding a special rebuild phase for the initial installation of bundled modules. (@iarna)

BAD NAME, NO CRASH

  • b78fec9 #9766 Refactor all attempts to read the module name or package name to go via a single function, with appropriate guards unusual circumstances where they aren't where we expect them. This ultimately will ensure we don't see any more recurrences of the localeCompare error and related crashers. (@iarna)

MISCELLANEOUS BUG FIXES

  • 22a3af0 #9553 Factor the lifecycle code to manage paths out into its own module and use that. (@kentcdodds)
  • 6a29fe3 #9677 Start testing our stuff in node 4 on travis (@fscherwi)
  • 508c6a4 #9669 Make recalculateMetadata more resilient to unexpectedly bogus dependency specifiers. (@tmct)
  • 3c44763 #9643 Update install --only to ignore the NODE_ENV var and just use the only value, if specified. (@watilde)
  • 87336c3 #9879 npm@3's shrinkwrap was refusing to shrinkwrap if an optional dependency was missing– patch it to allow this. (@mantoni)

DOCUMENTATION UPDATES

v3.3.6 (2015-09-30):

I have the most exciting news for you this week. YOU HAVE NO IDEA. Well, ok, maybe you do if you follow my twitter.

Performance just got 5 bazillion times better (under some circumstances, ymmv, etc). So– my test scenario is our very own website. In npm@2, on my macbook running npm ls takes about 5 seconds. Personally it's more than I'd like, but it's entire workable. In npm@3 it has been taking 50 seconds, which is appalling. But after doing some work on Monday isolating the performance issues I've been able to reduce npm@3's run time back down to 5 seconds.

Other scenarios were even worse, there was one that until now in npm@3 that took almost 6 minutes, and has been reduced to 14 seconds.

  • 7bc0d4c cf42217 #8826 Stop using deepclone on super big datastructures. Avoid cloning all-together even when that means mutating things, when possible. Otherwise use a custom written tree-copying function that understands the underlying datastructure well enough to only copy what we absolutely need to. (@iarna)

In other news, look for us this Friday and Saturday at the amazing Open Source and Feelings conference, where something like a third of the company will be attending.

And finally a dependency update

And some subdep updates

v3.3.5 (2015-09-24):

Some of you all may not be aware, but npm is ALSO a company. I tell you this 'cause npm-the-company had an all-staff get together this week, flying in our remote folks from around the world. That was great, but it also basically eliminated normal work on Monday and Tuesday.

Still, we've got a couple of really important bug fixes this week. Plus a lil bit from the now LTS 2.x branch.

ATTENTION WINDOWS USERS

If you previously updated to npm 3 and you try to update again, you may get an error messaging telling you that npm won't install npm into itself. Until you are at 3.3.5 or greater, you can get around this with npm install -f -g npm.

  • bef06f5 #9741 Uh... so... er... it seems that since npm@3.2.0 on Windows with a default configuration, it's been impossible to update npm. Well, that's not actually true, there's a work around (see above), but it shouldn't be complaining in the first place. (@iarna)

STACK OVERFLOWS ON PUBLISH

  • 330b496 #9667 We were keeping track of metadata about your project while packing the tree in a way that resulted in this data being written to packed tar files headers. When this metadata included cycles, it resulted in the the tar file entering an infinite recursive loop and eventually crashing with a stack overflow.

    I've patched this by keeping track of your metadata by closing over the variables in question instead, and I've further restricted gathering and tracking the metadata to times when it's actually needed. (Which is only if you need bundled modules.) (@iarna)

LESS CRASHY ERROR MESSAGES ON BAD PACKAGES

  • 829921f #9741 Packages with invalid names or versions were crashing the installer. These are now captured and warned as was originally intended. (@iarna)

ONE DEPENDENCY UPDATE

AND ONE SUBDEPENDENCY

v3.3.4 (2015-09-17):

This is a relatively quiet release, bringing a few bug fixes and some module updates, plus via the 2.14.5 release some forward compatibility fixes with versions of Node that aren't yet released.

NO BETA NOTICE THIS TIME!!

But, EXCITING NEWS FRIENDS, this week marks the exit of npm@3 from beta. This means that the week of this release, v3.3.3 will become latest and this version (v3.3.4) will become next!!

CRUFT FOR THE CRUFT GODS

What I call "cruft", by which I mean, files sitting around in your node_modules folder, will no longer produce warnings in npm ls nor during npm install. This brings npm@3's behavior in line with npm@2.

BETTER ERROR MESSAGE

MODULE UPDATES

SUB DEP MODULE UPDATES

v3.3.3 (2015-09-10):

This short week brought us brings us a few small bug fixes, a doc change and a whole lotta dependency updates.

Plus, as usual, this includes a forward port of everything in npm@2.14.4.

BETA BUT NOT FOREVER

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

REMOVE INSTALLED BINARIES ON WINDOWS

So waaaay back at the start of August, I fixed a bug with #9198. That fix made it so that if you had two modules installed that both installed the same binary (eg gulp & gulp-cli), that removing one wouldn't remove the binary if it was owned by the other.

It did this by doing some hocus-pocus that, turns out, was Unix-specific, so on Windows it just threw up its hands and stopped removing installed binaries at all. Not great.

So today we're fixing that– it let us maintain the same safety that we added in #9198, but ALSO works with windows.

API DOCUMENTATION HAS BEEN SACRIFICED THE API GOD

The documentation of the internal APIs of npm is going away, because it would lead people into thinking they should integrate with npm by using it. Please don't do that! In the future, we'd like to give you a suite of stand alone modules that provide better, more stand alone APIs for your applications to build on. But for now, call the npm binary with process.exec or process.spawn instead.

ALLOW npm link ON WINDOWS W/ PRERELEASE VERSIONS OF NODE

We never meant to have this be a restriction in the first place and it was only just discovered with the recent node 4.0.0 release candidate.

graceful-fs update

We're updating all of npm's deps to use the most recent graceful-fs. This turns out to be important for future not yet released versions of node, because older versions monkey-patch fs in ways that will break in the future. Plus it ALSO makes use of process.binding which is an internal API that npm definitely shouldn't have been using. We're not done yet, but this is the bulk of them.

DEPENDENCY UPDATES

THE DEPENDENCIES OF OUR DEPENDENCIES ARE OUR DEPENDENCIES UPDATES

v3.3.2 (2015-09-04):

PLEASE HOLD FOR THE NEXT AVAILABLE MAINTAINER

This is a tiny little maintenance release, both to update dependencies and to keep npm@3 up to date with changes made to npm@2. @othiym23 is putting out this release (again) as his esteemed colleague @iarna finishes relocating herself, her family, and her sizable anime collection all the way across North America. It contains all the goodies in npm@2.14.3 and one other dependency update.

BETA WARNINGS FOR FUN AND PROFIT

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

That said, it's getting there! It will be leaving beta very soon!

ONE OTHER DEPENDENCY UPDATE

  • bb5de34 is-my-json-valid@2.12.2: Upgrade to a new, modernized version of json-pointer. (@mafintosh)

v3.3.1 (2015-08-27):

Hi all, this npm@3 update brings you another round of bug fixes. The headliner here is that npm update works again. We're running down the clock on blocker 3.x issues! Shortly after that hits zero we'll be promoting 3.x to latest!!

And of course, we have changes that were brought forward from 2.x. Check out the release notes for 2.14.1 and 2.14.2.

BETA WARNINGS FOR FUN AND PROFIT

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

NPM UPDATE, NOW AGAIN YOUR FRIEND

  • f130a00 #9095 npm update once again works! Previously, after selecting packages to update, it would then pick the wrong location to run the install from. (@iarna)

MORE VERBOSING FOR YOUR VERBOSE LIFECYCLES

  • d088b7d #9227 Add some additional logging at the verbose and silly levels when running lifecycle scripts. Hopefully this will make debugging issues with them a bit easier! (@saper)

AND SOME OTHER BUG FIXES…

  • f4a5784 #9308 Make fetching metadata for local modules faster! This ALSO means that doing things like running npm repo won't build your module and maybe run prepublish. (@iarna)

  • 4468c92 #9205 Fix a bug where local modules would sometimes not resolve relative links using the correct base path. (@iarna)

  • d395a6b #8995 Certain combinations of packages could result in different install orders for their initial installation than for reinstalls run on the same folder. (@iarna)

  • d119ea6 #9113 Make extraneous packages always up in npm ls. Previously, if an extraneous package had a dependency that depended back on the original package this would result in the package not showing up in ls. (@iarna)

  • 02420dc #9113 Stop warning about missing top level package.json files. Errors in said files will still be reported. (@iarna)

SOME DEP UPDATES

SOME DEPS OF DEPS UPDATES

v3.3.0 (2015-08-13):

This is a pretty EXCITING week. But I may be a little excitable– or possibly sleep deprived, it's sometimes hard to tell them apart. =D So Kat really went the extra mile this week and got the client side support for teams and orgs out in this week's 2.x release. You can't use that just yet, 'cause we have to turn on some server side stuff too, but this way it'll be there for you all the moment we do! Check out the details over in the 2.14.0 release notes!

But we over here in 3.x ALSO got a new feature this week, check out the new --only and --also flags for better control over when dev and production dependencies are used by various npm commands.

That, and some important bug fixes round out this week. Enjoy everyone!

NEVER SHALL NOT BETA THE BETA

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. EXCITING NEW BETA WARNING!!! Ok, I fibbed, EXACTLY THE SAME BETA WARNINGS: npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

ONLY ALSO DEV

Hey we've got a SUPER cool new feature for you all, thanks to the fantastic work of @davglass and @bengl we have --only=prod, --only=dev, --also=prod and --also=dev options. These apply in various ways to: npm install, npm ls, npm outdated and npm update.

So for instance:

npm install --only=dev

Only installs dev dependencies. By contrast:

npm install --only=prod

Will only install prod dependencies and is very similar to --production but differs in that it doesn't set the environment variables that --production does.

The related new flag, --also is most useful with things like:

npm shrinkwrap --also=dev

As shrinkwraps don't include dev deps by default. This replaces passing in --dev in that scenario.

And that leads into the fact that this deprecates --dev as its semantics across commands were inconsistent and confusing.

DON'T TOUCH! THAT'S NOT YOUR BIN

  • b31812e #8996 When removing a module that has bin files, if one that we're going to remove is a symlink to a DIFFERENT module, leave it alone. This only happens when you have two modules that try to provide the same bin. (@iarna)

THERE'S AN END IN SIGHT

  • d2178a9 #9223 Close a bunch of infinite loops that could show up with symlink cycles in your dependencies. (@iarna)

OOPS DIDN'T MEAN TO FIX THAT

Well, not just yet. This was scheduled for next week, but it snuck into 2.x this week.

  • 139dd92 #8716 npm init will now only pick up the modules you install, not everything else that got flattened with them. (@iarna)

v3.2.2 (2015-08-08):

Lot's of lovely bug fixes for npm@3. I'm also suuuuper excited that I think we have a handle on stack explosions that effect a small portion of our users. We also have some tantalizing clues as to where some low hanging fruit may be for performance issues.

And of course, in addition to the npm@3 specific bug fixes, there are some great one's coming in from npm@2! @othiym23 put together that release this week– check out its release notes for the deets.

AS ALWAYS STILL BETA

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. Just like the airline safety announcements, we're not taking this plane off till we finish telling you: npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

BUG FIXES

  • a8c8a13 #9050 Resolve peer deps relative to the parent of the requirer (@iarna)
  • 05f0226 #9077 Fix crash when saving git+ssh urls (@iarna)
  • e4a3808 #8951 Extend our patch to allow * to match something when a package only has prerelease versions to everything and not just the cache. (@iarna)
  • d135abf #8871 Don't warn about a missing package.json or missing fields in the global install directory. (@iarna)

DEP VERSION BUMPS

v3.2.1 (2015-07-31):

AN EXTRA QUIET RELEASE

A bunch of stuff got deferred for various reasons, which just means more branches to land next week!

Don't forget to check out Kat's 2.x release for other quiet goodies.

AS ALWAYS STILL BETA

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. Yes, we're still reminding you of this. No, you can't be excused. npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

MAKING OUR TESTS TEST THE THING THEY TEST

  • 6e53c3d #8985 Many thanks to @bengl for noticing that one of our tests wasn't testing what it claimed it was testing! (@bengl)

MY PACKAGE.JSON WAS ALREADY IN THE RIGHT ORDER

  • eb2c7aa #9068 Stop sorting keys in the package.json that we haven't edited. Many thanks to @Qix- for bringing this up and providing a first pass at a patch for this. (@iarna)

DEV DEP UPDATE

v3.2.0 (2015-07-24):

MORE CONFIG, BETTER WINDOWS AND A BUG FIX

This is a smallish release with a new config option and some bug fixes. And lots of module updates.

BETA BETAS ON

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. Yes, we're still reminding you of this. No, you can't be excused. npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

NEW CONFIGS, LESS PROGRESS

  • 423d8f7 #8704 Add the ability to disable the new progress bar with --no-progress (@iarna)

AND BUG FIXES

  • b3ee452 #9038 We previously disabled the use of the new fs.access API on Windows, but the bug we were seeing is fixed in io.js@1.5.0 so we now use fs.access if you're using that version or greater. (@iarna)

  • b181fa3 #8921 #8637 Rejigger how we validate modules for install. This allow is to fix a problem where arch/os checking wasn't being done at all. It also made it easy to add back in a check that declines to install a module in itself unless you force it. (@iarna)

AND A WHOLE BUNCH OF SUBDEP VERSIONS

These are all development dependencies and semver-compatible subdep upgrades, so they should not have visible impact on users.

MERGED FORWARD

  • As usual, we've ported all the npm@2 goodies in this week's v2.13.3 release.

v3.1.3 (2015-07-17):

Rebecca: So Kat, I hear this week's other release uses a dialog between us to explain what changed?

Kat: Well, you could say that…

Rebecca: I would! This week I fixed more npm@3 bugs!

Kat: That sounds familiar.

Rebecca: Eheheheh, well, before we look at those, a word from our sponsor…

BETA IS AS BETA DOES

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. Yes, we're still reminding you of this. No, you can't be excused. npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

Rebecca: Ok, enough of the dialoguing, that's Kat's schtick. But do remember kids, betas hide in dark hallways waiting to break your stuff, stuff like…

SO MANY LINKS YOU COULD MAKE A CHAIN

  • 6d69ec9 #8967 Removing a module linked into your globals would result in having all of its subdeps removed. Since the npm release process does exactly this, it burned me -every- -single- -week-. =D While we're here, we also removed extraneous warns that used to spill out when you'd remove a symlink. (@iarna)

  • fdb360f #8874 Linking scoped modules was failing outright, but this fixes that and updates our tests so we don't do it again. (@iarna)

WE'LL TRY NOT TO CRACK YOUR WINDOWS

  • 9fafb18 #8701 npm@3 introduced permissions checks that run before it actually tries to do something. This saves you from having an install fail half way through. We did this using the shiny new fs.access function available in node 0.12 and io.js, with fallback options for older nodes. Unfortunately the way we implemented the fallback caused racey problems for Windows systems. This fixes that by ensuring we only ever run any one check on a directory once. BUT it turns out there are bugs in fs.access on Windows. So this ALSO just disables the use of fs.access on Windows entirely until that settles out. (@iarna)

ZOOM ZOOM, DEP UPDATES

  • 5656baa gauge@1.2.2: Better handle terminal resizes while printing the progress bar (@iarna)

MERGED FORWARD

v3.1.2

SO VERY BETA RELEASE

So, v3.1.1 managed to actually break installing local modules. And then immediately after I drove to an island for the weekend. 😁 So let's get this fixed outside the usual release train!

Fortunately it didn't break installing global modules and so you could swap it out for another version at least.

DISCLAIMER MEANS WHAT IT SAYS

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. Yes, we're still reminding you of this. No, you can't be excused. npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

THIS IS IT, THE REASON

v3.1.1

RED EYE RELEASE

Rebecca's up too late writing tests, so you can have npm@3 bug fixes! Lots of great new issues from you all! ❤️️ Keep it up!

YUP STILL BETA, PLEASE PAY ATTENTION

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. Yes, we're still reminding you of this. No, you can't be excused. npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

BOOGS

  • 9badfd6 #8608 Make global installs and uninstalls MUCH faster by only reading the directories of modules referred to by arguments. (@iarna
  • 075a5f0 #8660 Failed optional deps would still result in the optional deps own dependencies being installed. We now find them and fail them out of the tree. (@iarna
  • c9fbbb5 #8863 The "no compatible version found" error message was including only the version requested, not the name of the package we wanted. Ooops! (@iarna
  • 32e6bbd #8806 The "uninstall" lifecycle was being run after all of a module's dependencies has been removed. This reverses that order-- this means "uninstall" lifecycles can make use of the package's dependencies. (@iarna

MERGED FORWARD

v3.1.0 (2015-07-02):

This has been a brief week of bug fixes, plus some fun stuff merged forward from this weeks 2.x release. See the 2.13.0 release notes for details on that.

You all have been AWESOME with all the npm@3 bug reports! Thank you and keep up the great work!

NEW PLACE, SAME CODE

Remember how last week we said npm@3 would go to 3.0-next and latest tags? Yeaaah, no, please use npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest going forward.

I dunno why we said "suuure, we'll never do a feature release till we're out of beta" when we're still forward porting npm@2.x features. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

If you do accidentally use the old tag names, I'll be maintaining them for a few releases, but they won't be around forever.

YUP STILL BETA, PLEASE PAY ATTENTION

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@v3.x-next and npm@v3.x-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

BUGS ON THE WINDOWS

  • 0030ade #8685 Windows would hang when trying to clone git repos (@euprogramador)
  • b259bcc #8786 Windows permissions checks would cause installations to fail under some circumstances. We're disabling the checks entirely for this release. I'm hoping to check back with this next week to get a Windows friendly fix in. (@iarna)

SO MANY BUGS SQUASHED, JUST CALL US RAID

  • 0848698 #8686 Stop leaving progress bar cruft on the screen during publication (@ajcrites)
  • 57c3cea #8695 Remote packages with shrinkwraps made npm cause node + iojs to explode and catch fire. NO MORE. (@iarna)
  • 2875ba3 #8723 I uh, told you that engineStrict checking had gone away last week. TURNS OUT I LIED. So this is making that actually be true. (@iarna)
  • 28064e5 #3358 Consistently allow Unicode BOMs at the start of package.json files. Previously this was allowed some of time, like when you were installing modules, but not others, like running npm version or installing w/ --save. (@iarna)
  • 3cb6ad2 #8736 npm@3 wasn't running the "install" lifecycle in your current (toplevel) module. This broke modules that relied on C compilation. BOO. (@iarna)
  • 68da583 #8766 To my great shame, npm link package wasn't working AT ALL if you didn't have package already installed. (@iarna)
  • edd7448 read-package-tree@5.0.0: This update makes read-package-tree not explode when there's bad data in your node_modules folder. npm@2 silently ignores this sort of thing. (@iarna)
  • 0bb08c8 #8778 RELATEDLY, we now show any errors from your node_modules folder after your installation completes as warnings. We're also reporting these in npm ls now. (@iarna)
  • 6c248ff #8779 Hey, you know how we used to complain if your package.json was missing stuff? Well guess what, we are again. I know, I know, you can thank me later. (@iarna)
  • d6f7c98 So, when we were rolling back after errors we had untested code that tried to undo moves. Being untested it turns out it was very broken. I've removed it until we have time to do this right. (@iarna)

NEW VERSION

Just the one. Others came in via the 2.x release. Do check out its changelog, immediately following this message.

v3.0.0 (2015-06-25):

Wow, it's finally here! This has been a long time coming. We are all delighted and proud to be getting this out into the world, and are looking forward to working with the npm user community to get it production-ready as quickly as possible.

npm@3 constitutes a nearly complete rewrite of npm's installer to be easier to maintain, and to bring a bunch of valuable new features and design improvements to you all.

@othiym23 and @isaacs have been talking about the changes in this release for well over a year, and it's been the primary focus of @iarna since she joined the team.

Given that this is a near-total rewrite, all changes listed here are @iarna's work unless otherwise specified.

NO, REALLY, READ THIS PARAGRAPH. IT'S THE IMPORTANT ONE.

THIS IS BETA SOFTWARE. npm@3 will remain in beta until we're confident that it's stable and have assessed the effect of the breaking changes on the community. During that time we will still be doing npm@2 releases, with npm@2 tagged as latest and next. We'll also be publishing new releases of npm@3 as npm@3.0-next and npm@3.0-latest alongside those versions until we're ready to switch everyone over to npm@3. We need your help to find and fix its remaining bugs. It's a significant rewrite, so we are sure there still significant bugs remaining. So do us a solid and deploy it in non-critical CI environments and for day-to-day use, but maybe don't use it for production maintenance or frontline continuous deployment just yet.

BREAKING CHANGES

peerDependencies

grunt, gulp, and broccoli plugin maintainers take note! You will be affected by this change!

  • #6930 (#6565) peerDependencies no longer cause anything to be implicitly installed. Instead, npm will now warn if a packages peerDependencies are missing, but it's up to the consumer of the module (i.e. you) to ensure the peers get installed / are included in package.json as direct dependencies or devDependencies of your package.
  • #3803 npm also no longer checks peerDependencies until after it has fully resolved the tree.

This shifts the responsibility for fulfilling peer dependencies from library / framework / plugin maintainers to application authors, and is intended to get users out of the dependency hell caused by conflicting peerDependency constraints. npm's job is to keep you out of dependency hell, not put you in it.

engineStrict
  • #6931 The rarely-used package.json option engineStrict has been deprecated for several months, producing warnings when it was used. Starting with npm@3, the value of the field is ignored, and engine violations will only produce warnings. If you, as a user, want strict engines field enforcement, just run npm config set engine-strict true.

As with the peer dependencies change, this is about shifting control from module authors to application authors. It turns out engineStrict was very difficult to understand even harder to use correctly, and more often than not just made modules using it difficult to deploy.

npm view
  • 77f1aec With npm view (aka npm info), always return arrays for versions, maintainers, etc. Previously npm would return a plain value if there was only one, and multiple values if there were more. (@KenanY)

KNOWN BUGS

Again, this is a BETA RELEASE, so not everything is working just yet. Here are the issues that we already know about. If you run into something that isn't on this list, let us know!

  • #8575 Circular deps will never be removed by the prune-on-uninstall code.
  • #8588 Local deps where the dep name and the name in the package.json differ don't result in an error.
  • #8637 Modules can install themselves as direct dependencies. npm@2 declined to do this.
  • #8660 Dependencies of failed optional dependencies aren't rolled back when the optional dependency is, and then are reported as extraneous thereafter.

NEW FEATURES

The multi-stage installer!

  • #5919 Previously the installer had a set of steps it executed for each package and it would immediately start executing them as soon as it decided to act on a package.

    But now it executes each of those steps at the same time for all packages, waiting for all of one stage to complete before moving on. This eliminates many race conditions and makes the code easier to reason about.

This fixes, for instance:

  • #6926 (#5001, #6170) install and postinstall lifecycle scripts now only execute after all the module with the script's dependencies are installed.
Install: it looks different!

You'll now get a tree much like the one produced by npm ls that highlights in orange the packages that were installed. Similarly, any removed packages will have their names prefixed by a -.

Also, npm outdated used to include the name of the module in the Location field:

Package                Current  Wanted  Latest  Location
deep-equal             MISSING   1.0.0   1.0.0  deep-equal
glob                     4.5.3   4.5.3  5.0.10  rimraf > glob

Now it shows the module that required it as the final point in the Location field:

Package                Current  Wanted  Latest  Location
deep-equal             MISSING   1.0.0   1.0.0  npm
glob                     4.5.3   4.5.3  5.0.10  npm > rimraf

Previously the Location field was telling you where the module was on disk. Now it tells you what requires the module. When more than one thing requires the module you'll see it listed once for each thing requiring it.

Install: it works different!
  • #6928 (#2931 #2950) npm install when you have an npm-shrinkwrap.json will ensure you have the modules specified in it are installed in exactly the shape specified no matter what you had when you started.
  • #6913 (#1341 #3124 #4956 #6349 #5465) npm install when some of your dependencies are missing sub-dependencies will result in those sub-dependencies being installed. That is, npm install now knows how to fix broken installs, most of the time.
  • #5465 If you directly npm install a module that's already a subdep of something else and your new version is incompatible, it will now install the previous version nested in the things that need it.
  • a2b50cf #5693 When installing a new module, if it's mentioned in your npm-shrinkwrap.json or your package.json use the version specifier from there if you didn't specify one yourself.
Flat, flat, flat!

Your dependencies will now be installed maximally flat. Insofar as is possible, all of your dependencies, and their dependencies, and THEIR dependencies will be installed in your project's node_modules folder with no nesting. You'll only see modules nested underneath one another when two (or more) modules have conflicting dependencies.

  • #3697 This will hopefully eliminate most cases where windows users ended up with paths that were too long for Explorer and other standard tools to deal with.
  • #6912 (#4761 #4037) This also means that your installs will be deduped from the start.
  • #5827 This deduping even extends to git deps.
  • #6936 (#5698) Various commands are dedupe aware now.

This has some implications for the behavior of other commands:

  • npm uninstall removes any dependencies of the module that you specified that aren't required by any other module. Previously, it would only remove those that happened to be installed under it, resulting in left over cruft if you'd ever deduped.
  • npm ls now shows you your dependency tree organized around what requires what, rather than where those modules are on disk.
  • #6937 npm dedupe now flattens the tree in addition to deduping.

And bundling of dependencies when packing or publishing changes too:

  • #2442 bundledDependencies no longer requires that you specify deduped sub deps. npm can now see that a dependency is required by something bundled and automatically include it. To put that another way, bundledDependencies should ONLY include things that you included in dependencies, optionalDependencies or devDependencies.
  • #5437 When bundling a dependency that's both a devDependency and the child of a regular dependency, npm bundles the child dependency.

As a demonstration of our confidence in our own work, npm's own dependencies are now flattened, deduped, and bundled in the npm@3 style. This means that npm@3 can't be packed or published by npm@2, which is something to be aware of if you're hacking on npm.

Shrinkwraps: they are a-changin'!

First of all, they should be idempotent now (#5779). No more differences because the first time you install (without npm-shrinkwrap.json) and the second time (with npm-shrinkwrap.json).

  • #6781 Second, if you save your changes to package.json and you have npm-shrinkwrap.json, then it will be updated as well. This applies to all of the commands that update your tree:
    • npm install --save
    • npm update --save
    • npm dedupe --save (#6410)
    • npm uninstall --save
  • #4944 (#5161 #5448) Third, because node_modules folders are now deduped and flat, shrinkwrap has to also be smart enough to handle this.

And finally, enjoy this shrinkwrap bug fix:

  • #3675 When shrinkwrapping a dependency that's both a devDependency and the child of a regular dependency, npm now correctly includes the child.
The Age of Progress (Bars)!
  • #6911 (#1257 #5340 #6420) The spinner is gone (yay? boo? will you miss it?), and in its place npm has progress bars, so you actually have some sense of how long installs will take. It's provided in Unicode and non-Unicode variants, and Unicode support is automatically detected from your environment.

TINY JEWELS

The bottom is where we usually hide the less interesting bits of each release, but each of these are small but incredibly useful bits of this release, and very much worth checking out:

  • 9ebe312 Build system maintainers, rejoice: npm does a better job of cleaning up after itself in your temporary folder.
  • #6942 Check for permissions issues prior to actually trying to install anything.
  • Emit warnings at the end of the installation when possible, so that they'll be on your screen when npm stops.
  • #3505 npm --dry-run: You can now ask that npm only report what it would have done with the new --dry-run flag. This can be passed to any of the commands that change your node_modules folder: install, uninstall, update and dedupe.
  • 81b46fb npm now knows the correct URLs for npm bugs and npm repo for repositories hosted on Bitbucket and GitLab, just like it does for GitHub (and GitHub support now extends to projects hosted as gists as well as traditional repositories).
  • 5be4008a npm has been cleaned up to pass the standard style checker. Forrest and Rebecca both feel this makes it easier to read and understand the code, and should also make it easier for new contributors to put merge-ready patches. (@othiym23)

ZARRO BOOGS

  • 6401643 Make sure the global install directory exists before installing to it. (@thefourtheye)
  • #6158 When we remove modules we do so inside-out running unbuild for each one.
  • 960a765 The short usage information for each subcommand has been brought in sync with the documentation. (@smikes)