npm

This is just enough info to get you up and running.

More info available via man npm.

Simple Install

To install npm, do this:

mkdir npm
curl -L http://github.com/isaacs/npm/tarball/stable | tar xz --strip 1 -C npm
cd npm
make

If it dies with a "Permission Denied" or EACCESS error, then that probably means that you are running node in a shared root-owned location. In that case, you'll have to use sudo, and it'll behave like a multi-user app.

You can customize this behavior by using the root and binroot config options. See npm-config(1)

More Fancy Installing

First, get the code. Maybe use git for this. That'd be cool. Very fancy.

The default make target is install-stable, which downloads the current stable version of npm, and installs that for you.

If you want to install the exact code that you're looking at, the bleeding-edge master branch, do this:

make install

If you'd prefer to just symlink in the current code so you can hack on it, you can do this:

make link

If you check out the Makefile, you'll see that these are just running npm commands at the cli.js script directly. You can also use npm without ever installing it by using ./cli.js instead of "npm".

A note about password security

In order to publish your packages, you must have your auth info saved into your .npmrc file. If Cipher and Decipher are supported in the "crypto" module, then npm will use them. However, as of node 0.1.92, these functions aren't integrated yet.

You can get around this by doing:

npm install crypto@0.0.5