NPM with dry run for testing?

[moimikey]

Was this a feature that used to exist or will exist eventually? I'm in the midst of writing a shell script with a dry-run option and wanted to pipe that action to NPM.

Thanks

[mfncooper]

Dry run meaning what, and for which npm commands? Note that much of npm's behaviour is driven by the contents of files that are downloaded from the registry, so there's not a lot of useful work it can do without downloading anything. And once you're downloading files, you're already beyond a dry run.

[moimikey]

I probably should be more of a tinkerer and actually take a look at the code to see how npm functions. I think I blindly asked the question out of anticipation to get my script finished.

Dry run in the sense that npm will display what dependencies it will be installing (with its normal verbose output), but not actually do any of the downloading and file dropping. Similar to wget --spider maybe.

[BorePlusPlus]

👍

[BorePlusPlus]

I would be interested in having a dry run option for install npm install --dry-run which would print out what would npm install if it was to run the command. I'd find it useful in my docker workflow.

Is there any desire for such an option? If I spend some time to implement it, does it stand a chance of being merged or should I do it as a standalone project?

Cheers

[moimikey]

and 2 years later, i'm still interested as well :)

[othiym23]

You're in luck, because a version of --dry-run is included in the multi-stage branch of npm, which will someday soon become npm@3.

[BorePlusPlus]

Nice to hear that. Any approximate timeline as to when this may happen?

[othiym23]

See #7774 for what needs to be done before we can put npm@3 into beta.

[BorePlusPlus]

Cool - cheers.

[iarna]

Closing this as fixed in npm/npm#multi-stage

[moimikey]

amazing! thanks!