npm 101 – Version Ranges

The following is a snippet from this site’s package.json:

  "devDependencies": {
    "bower": "^1.6.5",
    "grunt": "~0.4.5",
    "grunt-contrib-imagemin": "~0.9.4",
    "grunt-contrib-sass": "~0.9.2",
    "grunt-contrib-watch": "~0.6.1",
    "matchdep": "~0.3.0"
  }

As per the JSON spec, we’ve got a series of key/value pairs making up the devDependencies object: the name of the package we want installed for those working on the project, and the version number of that package. However, using npm install <package> will leave odd extra characters in the generated file. So what do they mean?

It’s possible to add configure your project to help ensure only a specific version of a package is added. Create a file called .npmrc, and specify save-exact=true. As a bonus, you can also added save=true to make sure that any new installs are added to your projects’ package.json