3. Installing and using NPM packages #

Created Sunday 19 July 2020

• Some useful packages:
  1. live-server - makes a local server with index.html as the homepage. Browser refreshes automatically when a file is changed.
  2. lodash - syntactic sugar for JavaScript.
• A package can be installed in two ways:

1. Locally - installed only in the current directory
   • npm install package_name
   • Creates a node_modules folder inside the current directory.
2. Global - available from anywhere in the computer
   • npm install -g package_name
   • no new folder is created, except in the node default directory

• package.json has all the dependencies stored in it.
• Technically, the node_modules directory is not a part of the source code, it’s more of an SDK. So its never uploaded to a repo. This can be done by including /node_modules in the .gitignore file.
• package.json also contains scripts to run the project, one-click to run.