3.2 NPM Packages

• NPM Packages Documentation
• package A package is a file or directory that is described by a package.json file.
  1. A folder containing a program described by a package.json file.
  2. A gzipped tarball containing (1).
  3. A URL that resolves to (2).
  4. A ‘<name>@<version>’ that is published on the registry with (3).
  5. A ‘<name>@<tag>’ that points to (4).
  6. A ‘<name>’ that has a latest tag satisfying (5).
  7. A git url that, when cloned, results in (1).

     Git URLs used for npm packages can be formatted in the following ways:

     git://github.com/user/project.git#commit-ish
     

     git+ssh://user@hostname:project.git#commit-ish
     

     git+http://user@hostname/project/blah.git#commit-ish
     

     git+https://user@hostname/project/blah.git#commit-ish
     

• module A module is any file or directory in the node_modules directory that can be loaded by the Node.js require() function.

  Since modules are not required to have a package.json file, not all modules are packages. Only modules that have a package.json file are also packages.

  In the context of a Node program, the module is also the thing that was loaded from a file. in the following program:

  var req = require('request')
  

  we might say that "The variable req refers to the request module".