NAME¶

npm-view

Synopsis¶

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Description¶

This command shows data about a package and prints it to stdout.

As an example, to view information about the connect package from the registry, you would run:

npm view connect

The default version is &quot;latest&quot; if unspecified.

Field names can be specified after the package descriptor.
For example, to show the dependencies of the ronn package at version
0.3.5, you could do the following:

npm view ronn@0.3.5 dependencies

By default, npm view shows data about the current project context (by looking for a package.json).
To show field data for the current project use a file path (i.e.
.):

npm view . dependencies

You can view child fields by separating them with a period.
To view the git repository URL for the latest version of npm, you would run the following command:

npm view npm repository.url

This makes it easy to view information about a dependency with a bit of shell scripting.
For example, to view all the data about the version of opts that ronn depends on, you could write the following:

npm view opts@$(npm view ronn dependencies.opts)

For fields that are arrays, requesting a non-numeric field will return all of the values from the objects in the list.
For example, to get all the contributor email addresses for the express package, you would run:

npm view express contributors.email

You may also use numeric indices in square braces to specifically select an item in an array field.
To just get the email address of the first contributor in the list, you can run:

npm view express contributors[0].email

If the field value you are querying for is a property of an object, you should run:

npm view express time'[4.8.0]'

Note: When accessing object properties that contain special characters or numeric keys, you need to use quotes around the key name.
For example, to get the publish time of a specific version:

npm view express "time[4.17.1]"

Without quotes, the shell may interpret the square brackets as glob patterns, causing the command to fail.
You can also access the time field for a specific version by specifying the version in the package descriptor:

npm view express@4.17.1 time

This will return all version-time pairs, but the context will be for that specific version.

Multiple fields may be specified, and will be printed one after another.
For example, to get all the contributor names and email addresses, you can do this:

npm view express contributors.name contributors.email

"Person" fields are shown as a string if they would be shown as an object.
So, for example, this will show the list of npm contributors in the shortened string format.
(See package.json for more on this.)

npm view npm contributors

If a version range is provided, then data will be printed for every matching version of the package.
This will show which version of jsdom was required by each matching version of yui3:

npm view yui3@'>0.5.4' dependencies.jsdom

To show the connect package version history, you can do this:

npm view connect versions

Field Access Patterns¶

The npm view command supports different ways to access nested fields and array elements in package metadata. Understanding these patterns makes it easier to extract specific information.

# Access nested properties
npm view npm repository.url
npm view express bugs.url

# Get the first contributor's email
npm view express contributors[0].email
# Get the second maintainer's name
npm view express maintainers[1].name

# Get publish time for a specific version
npm view express "time[4.17.1]"
# Get dist-tags
npm view express "dist-tags.latest"

# Get all contributor emails
npm view express contributors.email
# Get all contributor names
npm view express contributors.name

Configuration¶

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Output¶

If only a single string field for a single version is output, then it will not be colorized or quoted, to enable piping the output to another command.
If the field is an object, it will be output as a JavaScript object literal.

If the --json flag is given, the outputted fields will be JSON.

If the version range matches multiple versions then each printed value will be prefixed with the version it applies to.

If multiple fields are requested, then each of them is prefixed with the field name.

See Also¶