nice-package ✨📦✨

Clean up messy package metadata from the npm registry

The package data served by the npm registry is messy and confusing. The folks at npm, Inc maintain a tool called normalize-package-data which does a lot of work to clean this data up, but the resulting object is still a bit confusing.

nice-package uses normalize-package-data as a starter, then does even more package cleanup:

• uses the doc['dist-tags'].latest as the baseline for package metadata
• derives starsCount from the users object
• derives a versions array from the time object
• renames _npmUser to lastPublisher, because it's a more intuitive name.
• renames maintainers to owners, for consistency with the CLI commands.
• normalizes GitHub repository URLs to https format
• moves internal bookkeeping properties like _id and _from into an other object that can easily be omitted.
• more...

See Also

• package-stream: streams nice packages from the npm registry.
• nice-registry: A server that dishes out nice packges.
• fetch-nice-package: fetch a nice package by name.

Installation

1npm install nice-package --save

Usage

nice-package exports a class. To create a new package instance, call new Package(doc), where doc is a JSON package object from the npm registry:

1const got = require('got')
2const Package = require('nice-package')
3
4got('https://registry.npmjs.com/express', {json: true})
5  .then(function (doc) {
6    var pkg = new Package(doc)
7    console.log(JSON.stringify(pkg, null, 2))
8  })

You can also instantiate a nice package from package.json data:

1const Package = require('nice-package')
2const pkg = new Package(require('node_modules/express/package.json'))
3
4pkg.dependsOn('array-flatten')
5// => true

Customizing the Package Object

You can pick specific properties to return:

1const pkg = new Package(pkgData, {pick: ['name', 'description']})
2
3// {
4//   name: 'tlds',
5//   description: 'List of TLDs'
6// }

or you can omit properties. Sometimes you don't want the other data, the readme, etc.

1const pkg = new Package(pkgData, {omit: ['other', 'readme', 'versions']})

Note: pick and omit will also accept comma-delimited strings instead of arrays. This works nicely if you're using query params from a URL as options to nice-package:

1const pkg = new Package(pkgData, {omit: 'other,readme,versions'})

Convenience Methods

A nice package comes with convenience methods:

pkg.mentions(query)

• query String

Performs a case-insensitive search against the JSON-stringified object. Returns a Boolean indicating whether the given query is present in the object.

pkg.dependsOn(pkgName)

• pkgName String - The name of another package

Returns a Boolean indicating whether the given pkgName is listed in dependencies.

pkg.devDependsOn(pkgName)

• pkgName String - The name of another package

Returns a Boolean indicating whether the given pkgName is listed in devDependencies.

pkg.somehowDependsOn(pkgName)

• pkgName String - The name of another package

Returns a Boolean indicating whether the given pkgName is listed in dependencies or devDependencies.

pkg.depNames

A getter method that returns an array of the dependencies keys.

pkg.devDepNames

A getter method that returns an array of the devDependencies keys.

pkg.allDepNames

A getter method that returns an array of all the dependencies and devDependencies keys.

Validation

nice-package uses a JSON schema to validate packages.

The following properties are required:

• name String
• description String
• version String

To determine if a package is valid, use the pkg.valid getter method:

1pkg.valid
2// => false

To see validation errors on a package, use the pkg.validationErrors getter method:

1pkg.validationErrors

The result is an array of revalidator errors.

Tests

1npm install
2npm test

Dependencies

• github-url-to-object: Extract user, repo, and other interesting properties from GitHub URLs
• normalize-registry-metadata: clean package metadata objects you get from registry changes feeds
• revalidator: A cross-browser / node.js validator powered by JSON Schema
• semver: The semantic version parser used by npm.

Dev Dependencies

• require-dir: Helper to require() directories.
• standard: JavaScript Standard Style
• tap-spec: Formatted TAP output like Mocha's spec reporter
• tape: tap-producing test harness for node and browsers

License

MIT

Credits

💛 Thanks to emilyrose for giving up the nice-package name on npm.

Generated by package-json-to-readme