npm init with custom values

npm init command is the simplest way to start a project, but filling answers to those questions are irritating. If we use npm init -y it will skip all the questions, but it will generate the package.json with npm default values. We have to update the author details, version and license later.

To make this easier we can set the author details, starting version and our favorite license in the .npmrc file so that next time we do npm init -y instead of npm default npm use .npmrc and fill the details.

copy paste the below code in the notepad and run in the terminal

npm config set init-author-name "Suresh Alagarsamy"
npm config set init-author-email "[email protected]"
npm config set init-author-url "http://example.com/"
npm config set init-license "MIT"

Now the .npmrc will have these configuration (To find the .npmrc navigate to account folder C:\Users\SURESHA)

init-author-name=Suresh Alagarsamy
[email protected]
init-author-url=http://example.com/
init-license=MIT

Please note that your package.json will update only updated. See the code sample

{
  "name": "test",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "Suresh Alagarsamy <[email protected]> (http://example.com/)",
  "license": "MIT"
}

Next time when we do npm init -y this will set the author name as Your name, email as [email protected], url as http://example.com/ and license as MIT.

globally installed packages

Get list of globally installed packages

npm list -g --depth 0