The default npm list command not only list the packages installed locally but also the packages they depend on. To most users, showing packages dependency is not necessary, as most of the time, we only want to know what is installed. To fix this, the --depth=0 option can be used:
npm ls --depth=0
So we get the list on the left instead of on the right:
dir_name@1.0.0 /path/blah/blah dir_name@1.0.0 /path/blah/blah
|-- babel-core@5.8.3 |-- babel-core@5.8.3
|- babel-plugin-constant-folding@1.0.1
|- babel-plugin-eval@1.0.1
...
However, this is not enough. Because if you have installed a package either
- globally or
- locally but without adding it to the package.json file
You are likely to see these errors:
npm ERR! max depth reached: webpack@*, required by babel-loader@5.3.2 // this error is caused by installing webpack globally
npm ERR! extraneous: file-loader@0.8.4 /blah/file-loader // this error is caused by using npm install instead of npm install --save
To ignore these errors, a solution provided by this blog works:
npm ls --depth=0 "$@" 2>/dev/null
To create a proper shorcut, open your .bash_profile (for Mac):
alias nl="npm ls --depth=0 "$@" 2>/dev/null"
alias nlg="npm ls -g --depth=0 "$@" 2>/dev/null" #for listing global packages
Reload the .bash_profile file and that's it!
. .bash_profile
To reference globally installed NPM packages (i.e. packages installed with the "-g" option, like npm install -g webpack), a NODE_PATH has to be set in your environment. I used NVM to manage node.js and here is my setting (for Mac):
export NODE_PATH=/Users/cheng/.nvm/versions/node/v0.12.7/lib/node_modules
Now, you can reference these packages from anywhere.
If you use other OS, check out this post on StackOverflow.
