You don't need --save anymore for NPM installs

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NPM evolved

Over time NPM evolved into a huge player in package management, and ever since version 5 of NPM, we no longer need to define this --save argument.

Meaning our packages will be saved by default into our package.json file.

I'm thrilled with this addition, as it's very rare to want to install a package that you don't need in your package.json file.

Installing dev dependencies using NPM

We also used to have the following command to install a package as a dev dependency.

npm install --save-dev package_name

This will place the package in your dev dependencies in the package.json file.

So to recap, the normal install will install our package under the dependencies, while the --save-dev argument will place them under devDependencies.

{ "name": "my_project", "version": "0.0.1", "dependencies": { "package_name": "^1.0.0", }, "devDependencies": { "package_dev_name": "^1.0.0", } }

NPM install additional flags

As we saw, the default install has no flags and will install our dependency. NPM, however gives us some flags to control the options.

-P, '--save-prod`: Package will install as a dependency

-D, --save-dev: Package will be installed as dev dependency

-O, --save-optional: Package will be installed as an optional dependency

--no-save: Package won't be saved in package.json file

These are the most important flags we can use. However, the only one you frequently use might be the -D flag.

Do keep in mind the letter flags are capital sensitive.

So to recap: we don't need to use the --save attribute anymore. This is now the default behavior. We can provide the -D flag to save a package as a dev dependency.

Thank you for reading this article. I hope you learned something new today. And thank you, NPM for making this available.

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You don't need --save anymore for NPM installs

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Thank you for reading, and let's connect!