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npm 5 was released today and one of the new features include deterministic installs with the creation of a package-lock.json file.
Is this file supposed to be kept in source control?
I'm assuming it's similar to yarn.lock and composer.lock, both of which are supposed to be kept in source control.
Yes, package-lock.json is intended to be checked into source control. If you're using npm 5+, you may see this notice on the command line: created a lockfile as package-lock.json. You should commit this file. According to npm help package-lock.json:
package-lock.json is automatically generated for any operations where npm
modifies either the node_modules tree, or package.json. It describes the
exact tree that was generated, such that subsequent installs are able to
generate identical trees, regardless of intermediate dependency updates.
This file is intended to be committed into source repositories, and serves
various purposes:
Describe a single representation of a dependency tree such that teammates, deployments, and continuous integration are guaranteed to install exactly the same dependencies.
Provide a facility for users to "time-travel" to previous states of node_modules without having to commit the directory itself.
To facilitate greater visibility of tree changes through readable source control diffs.
And optimize the installation process by allowing npm to skip repeated metadata resolutions for previously-installed packages.
One key detail about package-lock.json is that it cannot be published, and it
will be ignored if found in any place other than the toplevel package. It shares
a format with npm-shrinkwrap.json, which is essentially the same file, but
allows publication. This is not recommended unless deploying a CLI tool or
otherwise using the publication process for producing production packages.
If both package-lock.json and npm-shrinkwrap.json are present in the root of
a package, package-lock.json will be completely ignored.
Yes, you SHOULD:
commit the package-lock.json.
use npm ci instead of npm install when building your applications both on your CI and your local development machine
The npm ci workflow requires the existence of a package-lock.json.
A big downside of npm install command is its unexpected behavior that it may mutate the package-lock.json, whereas npm ci only uses the versions specified in the lockfile and produces an error
if the package-lock.json and package.json are out of sync
if a package-lock.json is missing.
Hence, running npm install locally, esp. in larger teams with multiple developers, may lead to lots of conflicts within the package-lock.json and developers to decide to completely delete the package-lock.json instead.
Yet there is a strong use-case for being able to trust that the project's dependencies resolve repeatably in a reliable way across different machines.
From a package-lock.json you get exactly that: a known-to-work state.
In the past, I had projects without package-lock.json / npm-shrinkwrap.json / yarn.lock files whose build would fail one day because a random dependency got a breaking update.
Those issue are hard to resolve as you sometimes have to guess what the last working version was.
If you want to add a new dependency, you still run npm install {dependency}. If you want to upgrade, use either npm update {dependency} or npm install ${dependendency}#{version} and commit the changed package-lock.json.
If an upgrade fails, you can revert to the last known working package-lock.json.
To quote npm doc:
It is highly recommended you commit the generated package lock to
source control: this will allow anyone else on your team, your
deployments, your CI/continuous integration, and anyone else who runs
npm install in your package source to get the exact same dependency
tree that you were developing on. Additionally, the diffs from these
changes are human-readable and will inform you of any changes npm has
made to your node_modules, so you can notice if any transitive
dependencies were updated, hoisted, etc.
And in regards to the difference between npm ci vs npm install:
The project must have an existing package-lock.json or npm-shrinkwrap.json.
If dependencies in the package lock do not match those in package.json, npm ci will exit with an error, instead of updating
the package lock.
npm ci can only install entire projects at a time: individual dependencies cannot be added with this command.
If a node_modules is already present, it will be automatically removed before npm ci begins its install.
It will never write to package.json or any of the package-locks: installs are essentially frozen.
Note: I posted a similar answer here
Yes, it's intended to be checked in. I want to suggest that it gets its own unique commit. We find that it adds a lot of noise to our diffs.
Yes, the best practice is to check-in (YES, CHECK-IN)
I agree that it will cause a lot of noise or conflict when seeing the diff. But the benefits are:
guarantee exact same version of every package between your dev and prod environments. This part is the most important when building in different environments at different times. You may use ^1.2.3 in your package.json, but how can you ensure each time npm install will pick up the same version in your dev machine and in the build server, especially those indirect dependency packages? Well, package-lock.json will ensure that. (With the help of npm ci which installs packages based on lock file)
it improves the installation process.
it helps with new audit feature npm audit fix.
I don't commit this file in my projects. What's the point ?
It's generated
It's the cause of a SHA1 code integrity err in gitlab with gitlab-ci.yml builds
Though it's true that I never use ^ in my package.json for libs because I had bad experiences with it.
To the people complaining about the noise when doing git diff:
git diff -- . ':(exclude)*package-lock.json' -- . ':(exclude)*yarn.lock'
What I did was use an alias:
alias gd="git diff --ignore-all-space --ignore-space-at-eol --ignore-space-change --ignore-blank-lines -- . ':(exclude)*package-lock.json' -- . ':(exclude)*yarn.lock'"
To ignore package-lock.json in diffs for the entire repository (everyone using it), you can add this to .gitattributes:
package-lock.json binary
yarn.lock binary
This will result in diffs that show "Binary files a/package-lock.json and b/package-lock.json differ whenever the package lock file was changed. Additionally, some Git services (notably GitLab, but not GitHub) will also exclude these files (no more 10k lines changed!) from the diffs when viewing online when doing this.
Yes, you can commit this file. From the npm's official docs:
package-lock.json is automatically generated for any operations where npm modifies either the node_modules tree, or package.json. It describes the exact tree that was generated, such that subsequent installs are able to generate identical trees, regardless of intermediate dependency updates.
This file is intended to be committed into source repositories[.]
Yes, it's a standard practice to commit package-lock.json.
The main reason for committing package-lock.json is that everyone in the project is on the same package version.
Pros:
If you follow strict versioning and don't allow updating to major versions automatically to save yourself from backward-incompatible changes in third-party packages committing package-lock helps a lot.
If you update a particular package, it gets updated in package-lock.json and everyone using the repository gets updated to that particular version when they take the pull of your changes.
Cons:
It can make your pull requests look ugly :)
npm install won't make sure that everyone in the project is on the same package version. npm ci will help with this.
Disable package-lock.json globally
type the following in your terminal:
npm config set package-lock false
this really work for me like magic
All answers say "YES" but that also depend of the project, the doc says:
One key detail about package-lock.json is that it cannot be published, and it will be ignored if found in any place other than the toplevel package.
This mean that you don't need to publish on npm your package-lock.json for dependency but you need to use package-lock.json in your repo to lock the version of your test dependency, build dependencies…
However, If your are using lerna for managing projects with multiple packages, you should put the package.json only on the root of your repo, not in each subpackage are created with npm init. You will get something like that :
.git
lerna.json
package.json
package-lock.json <--- here
packages/a/package.json
packages/a/lib/index.js
packages/b/package.json
packages/b/lib/index.js
My use of npm is to generate minified/uglified css/js and to generate the javascript needed in pages served by a django application. In my applications, Javascript runs on the page to create animations, some times perform ajax calls, work within a VUE framework and/or work with the css. If package-lock.json has some overriding control over what is in package.json, then it may be necessary that there is one version of this file. In my experience it either does not effect what is installed by npm install, or if it does, It has not to date adversely affected the applications I deploy to my knowledge. I don't use mongodb or other such applications that are traditionally thin client.
I remove package-lock.json from repo
because npm install generates this file, and npm install is part of the deploy process on each server that runs the app. Version control of node and npm are done manually on each server, but I am careful that they are the same.
When npm install is run on the server, it changes package-lock.json,
and if there are changes to a file that is recorded by the repo on the server, the next deploy WONT allow you to pull new changes from origin. That is
you can't deploy because the pull will overwrite the changes that have been made to package-lock.json.
You can't even overwrite a locally generated package-lock.json with what is on the repo (reset hard origin master), as npm will complain when ever you issue a command if the package-lock.json does not reflect what is in node_modules due to npm install, thus breaking the deploy. Now if this indicates that slightly different versions have been installed in node_modules, once again that has never caused me problems.
If node_modules is not on your repo (and it should not be), then package-lock.json should be ignored.
If I am missing something, please correct me in the comments, but the point that versioning is taken from this file makes no sense. The file package.json has version numbers in it, and I assume this file is the one used to build packages when npm install occurs, as when I remove it, npm install complains as follows:
jason#localhost:introcart_wagtail$ rm package.json
jason#localhost:introcart_wagtail$ npm install
npm WARN saveError ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/jason/webapps/introcart_devtools/introcart_wagtail/package.json'
and the build fails, however when installing node_modules or applying npm to build js/css, no complaint is made if I remove package-lock.json
jason#localhost:introcart_wagtail$ rm package-lock.json
jason#localhost:introcart_wagtail$ npm run dev
> introcart#1.0.0 dev /home/jason/webapps/introcart_devtools/introcart_wagtail
> NODE_ENV=development webpack --progress --colors --watch --mode=development
10% building 0/1 modules 1 active ...
Committing package-lock.json to the source code version control means that the project will use a specific version of dependencies that may or may not match those defined in package.json. while the dependency has a specific version without any Caret (^) and Tilde (~) as you can see, that's mean the dependency will not be updated to the most recent version. and npm install will pick up the same version as well as we need it for our current version of Angular.
Note : package-lock.json highly recommended to commit it IF I added any Caret (^) and Tilde (~) to the dependency to be updated during the CI.
I recently discovered the npm audit feature and ran the command to find vulnerabilities in a project I'm working on. Came across a bunch of them (over 100).
npm suggests that running npm audit fix will fix all vulnerabilities except those which have breaking changes. I didn't encounter any such vulnerability in my code and now it shows 0 vulnerabilities.
My question is that when I push the code to github will these vulnerabilities be fixed already for someone who clones/forks this repo?
For context, node_modules are ignored in my .gitignore file (Which means they are not pushed to github along with the code). Since node_modules is where these "vulnerability fixes" are applied, do they persist for everyone who then forks/clones this repo?
If so, how? Does it have something to do with package-lock.json?
If not, is there a way to make these changes persistent?
Yes it has to do with the package-lock.json, read more about package-locks here
According to the site currently, the package-lock represents a reproducible tree of your node_modules folder.
Yes, changes made by npm audit fix are persistent, but only if you commit your package-lock.json file to your git repository.
According to NPM, "this file is intended to be committed into source repositories."
If you commit your existing package-lock.json file to your repository and then run npm audit fix, you will see changes to your local package-lock.json file (assuming npm audit was able to fix any vulnerable packages). You can review these changes and then commit the package-lock.json file a second time to persist the changes.
I have a node package react-native-push-notification for which i have made some changes in the packages to fulfil my requirement. But every time i do a npm install the new (original package without my changes) package overlaps with my current package.
Is there any way i can restrict npm install to ignore my modified package? And also i want to push this package to git.
Any lead will be highly appreciated.
If I understand you correctly you have made some changes to the already existing node package react-native-push-notification and you would rather use your own version of it than the original.
You have a couple of options:
In package.json change react-native-push-notification to point to your git repo (e.g. your fork on github). This is not ideal since it makes semver problematic. But it works.
Rename your fork of the package and use that directly from npm. E.g. rename to react-native-push-notification2 or even better, use a scoped package name e.g. #yournick/react-native-push-notification and publish that to npm. Change your package.json to use this package instead.
Convince the authors of the original package to incorporate your changes. This is the ideal solution, but might be difficult to get your patch merged etc.
patch-package is exactly what you're looking for: https://github.com/ds300/patch-package
It will preserve your changes even after running npm install.
The best way to handle this would be to fork the repo https://help.github.com/articles/fork-a-repo/.
This way, you have control of the contents of the package.
Then update your package.json with your repo address.
I also would recommend not pushing your packages to Git. Packages are already under version control (in their own repo) and pushing to Git just bloats your repo for no reason.
Yes you can do it very easily. Fist of all go to the plugin GitHub repository then fork it to your profile. Before if you want to install this plugin from the direct repo, you have to run this command -
npm i https://github.com/zo0r/react-native-push-notification.git
But after successful fork, it will install the modified files that you have made changes and the command should be -
npm i https://github.com/YourUserName/react-native-push-notification.git
and boom your modified files never will change.
npm 5 was released today and one of the new features include deterministic installs with the creation of a package-lock.json file.
Is this file supposed to be kept in source control?
I'm assuming it's similar to yarn.lock and composer.lock, both of which are supposed to be kept in source control.
Yes, package-lock.json is intended to be checked into source control. If you're using npm 5+, you may see this notice on the command line: created a lockfile as package-lock.json. You should commit this file. According to npm help package-lock.json:
package-lock.json is automatically generated for any operations where npm
modifies either the node_modules tree, or package.json. It describes the
exact tree that was generated, such that subsequent installs are able to
generate identical trees, regardless of intermediate dependency updates.
This file is intended to be committed into source repositories, and serves
various purposes:
Describe a single representation of a dependency tree such that teammates, deployments, and continuous integration are guaranteed to install exactly the same dependencies.
Provide a facility for users to "time-travel" to previous states of node_modules without having to commit the directory itself.
To facilitate greater visibility of tree changes through readable source control diffs.
And optimize the installation process by allowing npm to skip repeated metadata resolutions for previously-installed packages.
One key detail about package-lock.json is that it cannot be published, and it
will be ignored if found in any place other than the toplevel package. It shares
a format with npm-shrinkwrap.json, which is essentially the same file, but
allows publication. This is not recommended unless deploying a CLI tool or
otherwise using the publication process for producing production packages.
If both package-lock.json and npm-shrinkwrap.json are present in the root of
a package, package-lock.json will be completely ignored.
Yes, you SHOULD:
commit the package-lock.json.
use npm ci instead of npm install when building your applications both on your CI and your local development machine
The npm ci workflow requires the existence of a package-lock.json.
A big downside of npm install command is its unexpected behavior that it may mutate the package-lock.json, whereas npm ci only uses the versions specified in the lockfile and produces an error
if the package-lock.json and package.json are out of sync
if a package-lock.json is missing.
Hence, running npm install locally, esp. in larger teams with multiple developers, may lead to lots of conflicts within the package-lock.json and developers to decide to completely delete the package-lock.json instead.
Yet there is a strong use-case for being able to trust that the project's dependencies resolve repeatably in a reliable way across different machines.
From a package-lock.json you get exactly that: a known-to-work state.
In the past, I had projects without package-lock.json / npm-shrinkwrap.json / yarn.lock files whose build would fail one day because a random dependency got a breaking update.
Those issue are hard to resolve as you sometimes have to guess what the last working version was.
If you want to add a new dependency, you still run npm install {dependency}. If you want to upgrade, use either npm update {dependency} or npm install ${dependendency}#{version} and commit the changed package-lock.json.
If an upgrade fails, you can revert to the last known working package-lock.json.
To quote npm doc:
It is highly recommended you commit the generated package lock to
source control: this will allow anyone else on your team, your
deployments, your CI/continuous integration, and anyone else who runs
npm install in your package source to get the exact same dependency
tree that you were developing on. Additionally, the diffs from these
changes are human-readable and will inform you of any changes npm has
made to your node_modules, so you can notice if any transitive
dependencies were updated, hoisted, etc.
And in regards to the difference between npm ci vs npm install:
The project must have an existing package-lock.json or npm-shrinkwrap.json.
If dependencies in the package lock do not match those in package.json, npm ci will exit with an error, instead of updating
the package lock.
npm ci can only install entire projects at a time: individual dependencies cannot be added with this command.
If a node_modules is already present, it will be automatically removed before npm ci begins its install.
It will never write to package.json or any of the package-locks: installs are essentially frozen.
Note: I posted a similar answer here
Yes, it's intended to be checked in. I want to suggest that it gets its own unique commit. We find that it adds a lot of noise to our diffs.
Yes, the best practice is to check-in (YES, CHECK-IN)
I agree that it will cause a lot of noise or conflict when seeing the diff. But the benefits are:
guarantee exact same version of every package between your dev and prod environments. This part is the most important when building in different environments at different times. You may use ^1.2.3 in your package.json, but how can you ensure each time npm install will pick up the same version in your dev machine and in the build server, especially those indirect dependency packages? Well, package-lock.json will ensure that. (With the help of npm ci which installs packages based on lock file)
it improves the installation process.
it helps with new audit feature npm audit fix.
I don't commit this file in my projects. What's the point ?
It's generated
It's the cause of a SHA1 code integrity err in gitlab with gitlab-ci.yml builds
Though it's true that I never use ^ in my package.json for libs because I had bad experiences with it.
To the people complaining about the noise when doing git diff:
git diff -- . ':(exclude)*package-lock.json' -- . ':(exclude)*yarn.lock'
What I did was use an alias:
alias gd="git diff --ignore-all-space --ignore-space-at-eol --ignore-space-change --ignore-blank-lines -- . ':(exclude)*package-lock.json' -- . ':(exclude)*yarn.lock'"
To ignore package-lock.json in diffs for the entire repository (everyone using it), you can add this to .gitattributes:
package-lock.json binary
yarn.lock binary
This will result in diffs that show "Binary files a/package-lock.json and b/package-lock.json differ whenever the package lock file was changed. Additionally, some Git services (notably GitLab, but not GitHub) will also exclude these files (no more 10k lines changed!) from the diffs when viewing online when doing this.
Yes, you can commit this file. From the npm's official docs:
package-lock.json is automatically generated for any operations where npm modifies either the node_modules tree, or package.json. It describes the exact tree that was generated, such that subsequent installs are able to generate identical trees, regardless of intermediate dependency updates.
This file is intended to be committed into source repositories[.]
Yes, it's a standard practice to commit package-lock.json.
The main reason for committing package-lock.json is that everyone in the project is on the same package version.
Pros:
If you follow strict versioning and don't allow updating to major versions automatically to save yourself from backward-incompatible changes in third-party packages committing package-lock helps a lot.
If you update a particular package, it gets updated in package-lock.json and everyone using the repository gets updated to that particular version when they take the pull of your changes.
Cons:
It can make your pull requests look ugly :)
npm install won't make sure that everyone in the project is on the same package version. npm ci will help with this.
Disable package-lock.json globally
type the following in your terminal:
npm config set package-lock false
this really work for me like magic
All answers say "YES" but that also depend of the project, the doc says:
One key detail about package-lock.json is that it cannot be published, and it will be ignored if found in any place other than the toplevel package.
This mean that you don't need to publish on npm your package-lock.json for dependency but you need to use package-lock.json in your repo to lock the version of your test dependency, build dependencies…
However, If your are using lerna for managing projects with multiple packages, you should put the package.json only on the root of your repo, not in each subpackage are created with npm init. You will get something like that :
.git
lerna.json
package.json
package-lock.json <--- here
packages/a/package.json
packages/a/lib/index.js
packages/b/package.json
packages/b/lib/index.js
My use of npm is to generate minified/uglified css/js and to generate the javascript needed in pages served by a django application. In my applications, Javascript runs on the page to create animations, some times perform ajax calls, work within a VUE framework and/or work with the css. If package-lock.json has some overriding control over what is in package.json, then it may be necessary that there is one version of this file. In my experience it either does not effect what is installed by npm install, or if it does, It has not to date adversely affected the applications I deploy to my knowledge. I don't use mongodb or other such applications that are traditionally thin client.
I remove package-lock.json from repo
because npm install generates this file, and npm install is part of the deploy process on each server that runs the app. Version control of node and npm are done manually on each server, but I am careful that they are the same.
When npm install is run on the server, it changes package-lock.json,
and if there are changes to a file that is recorded by the repo on the server, the next deploy WONT allow you to pull new changes from origin. That is
you can't deploy because the pull will overwrite the changes that have been made to package-lock.json.
You can't even overwrite a locally generated package-lock.json with what is on the repo (reset hard origin master), as npm will complain when ever you issue a command if the package-lock.json does not reflect what is in node_modules due to npm install, thus breaking the deploy. Now if this indicates that slightly different versions have been installed in node_modules, once again that has never caused me problems.
If node_modules is not on your repo (and it should not be), then package-lock.json should be ignored.
If I am missing something, please correct me in the comments, but the point that versioning is taken from this file makes no sense. The file package.json has version numbers in it, and I assume this file is the one used to build packages when npm install occurs, as when I remove it, npm install complains as follows:
jason#localhost:introcart_wagtail$ rm package.json
jason#localhost:introcart_wagtail$ npm install
npm WARN saveError ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/jason/webapps/introcart_devtools/introcart_wagtail/package.json'
and the build fails, however when installing node_modules or applying npm to build js/css, no complaint is made if I remove package-lock.json
jason#localhost:introcart_wagtail$ rm package-lock.json
jason#localhost:introcart_wagtail$ npm run dev
> introcart#1.0.0 dev /home/jason/webapps/introcart_devtools/introcart_wagtail
> NODE_ENV=development webpack --progress --colors --watch --mode=development
10% building 0/1 modules 1 active ...
Committing package-lock.json to the source code version control means that the project will use a specific version of dependencies that may or may not match those defined in package.json. while the dependency has a specific version without any Caret (^) and Tilde (~) as you can see, that's mean the dependency will not be updated to the most recent version. and npm install will pick up the same version as well as we need it for our current version of Angular.
Note : package-lock.json highly recommended to commit it IF I added any Caret (^) and Tilde (~) to the dependency to be updated during the CI.
I'm on a node project with a launcher and several homemade plugins. Those plugins are marked as dependencies in the launcher package.json with the git repo adress.
I recently tried npm shrinkwrap which perfectly give me the commit used for each of my plugins but any dev on plugins will break this. I trid to use npm link for my git repo, but they aren't tracked by shrinkwrap anymore.
So basically, how can I have cloned repo for my plugins where I can work and a way to get a snapshot of my dependencies at a precise moment?
Thank you for any lead you could give me.