npm 5 was released today and one of the new features include deterministic installs with the creation of a package-lock.json
file.
Is this file supposed to be kept in source control?
I'm assuming it's similar to yarn.lock
and composer.lock
, both of which are supposed to be kept in source control.
This question is related to
node.js
git
npm
version-control
lockfile
Yes, package-lock.json
is intended to be checked into source control. If you're using npm 5+, you may see this notice on the command line: created a lockfile as package-lock.json. You should commit this file.
According to npm help package-lock.json
:
package-lock.json
is automatically generated for any operations where npm modifies either thenode_modules
tree, orpackage.json
. It describes the exact tree that was generated, such that subsequent installs are able to generate identical trees, regardless of intermediate dependency updates.This file is intended to be committed into source repositories, and serves various purposes:
Describe a single representation of a dependency tree such that teammates, deployments, and continuous integration are guaranteed to install exactly the same dependencies.
Provide a facility for users to "time-travel" to previous states of
node_modules
without having to commit the directory itself.To facilitate greater visibility of tree changes through readable source control diffs.
And optimize the installation process by allowing npm to skip repeated metadata resolutions for previously-installed packages.
One key detail about
package-lock.json
is that it cannot be published, and it will be ignored if found in any place other than the toplevel package. It shares a format with npm-shrinkwrap.json, which is essentially the same file, but allows publication. This is not recommended unless deploying a CLI tool or otherwise using the publication process for producing production packages.If both
package-lock.json
andnpm-shrinkwrap.json
are present in the root of a package,package-lock.json
will be completely ignored.
Yes, it's intended to be checked in. I want to suggest that it gets its own unique commit. We find that it adds a lot of noise to our diffs.
Yes, you SHOULD:
package-lock.json
.npm ci
instead of npm install
when building your applications both on your CI and your local development machineThe npm ci
workflow requires the existence of a package-lock.json
.
A big downside of npm install
command is its unexpected behavior that it may mutate the package-lock.json
, whereas npm ci
only uses the versions specified in the lockfile and produces an error
package-lock.json
and package.json
are out of syncpackage-lock.json
is missing.Hence, running npm install
locally, esp. in larger teams with multiple developers, may lead to lots of conflicts within the package-lock.json
and developers to decide to completely delete the package-lock.json
instead.
Yet there is a strong use-case for being able to trust that the project's dependencies resolve repeatably in a reliable way across different machines.
From a package-lock.json
you get exactly that: a known-to-work state.
In the past, I had projects without package-lock.json
/ npm-shrinkwrap.json
/ yarn.lock
files whose build would fail one day because a random dependency got a breaking update.
Those issue are hard to resolve as you sometimes have to guess what the last working version was.
If you want to add a new dependency, you still run npm install {dependency}
. If you want to upgrade, use either npm update {dependency}
or npm install ${dependendency}@{version}
and commit the changed package-lock.json
.
If an upgrade fails, you can revert to the last known working package-lock.json
.
To quote npm doc:
It is highly recommended you commit the generated package lock to source control: this will allow anyone else on your team, your deployments, your CI/continuous integration, and anyone else who runs npm install in your package source to get the exact same dependency tree that you were developing on. Additionally, the diffs from these changes are human-readable and will inform you of any changes npm has made to your node_modules, so you can notice if any transitive dependencies were updated, hoisted, etc.
And in regards to the difference between npm ci
vs npm install
:
- The project must have an existing package-lock.json or npm-shrinkwrap.json.
- If dependencies in the package lock do not match those in package.json,
npm ci
will exit with an error, instead of updating the package lock.npm ci
can only install entire projects at a time: individual dependencies cannot be added with this command.- If a
node_modules
is already present, it will be automatically removed beforenpm ci
begins its install.- It will never write to
package.json
or any of the package-locks: installs are essentially frozen.
Note: I posted a similar answer here
Yes, the best practice is to check-in (YES, CHECK-IN)
I agree that it will cause a lot of noise or conflict when seeing the diff. But the benefits are:
^1.2.3
in your package.json
, but how can u ensure each time npm install
will pick up the same version in your dev machine and in the build server, especially those indirect dependency packages? Well, package-lock.json
will ensure that. (With the help of npm ci
which installs packages based on lock file)npm audit fix
(I think the audit feature is from npm version 6).I don't commit this file in my projects. What's the point ?
Though it's true that I never use ^ in my package.json for libs because I had bad experiences with it.
To the people complaining about the noise when doing git diff:
git diff -- . ':(exclude)*package-lock.json' -- . ':(exclude)*yarn.lock'
What I did was use an alias:
alias gd="git diff --ignore-all-space --ignore-space-at-eol --ignore-space-change --ignore-blank-lines -- . ':(exclude)*package-lock.json' -- . ':(exclude)*yarn.lock'"
To ignore package-lock.json in diffs for the entire repository (everyone using it), you can add this to .gitattributes
:
package-lock.json binary
yarn.lock binary
This will result in diffs that show "Binary files a/package-lock.json and b/package-lock.json differ whenever the package lock file was changed. Additionally, some Git services (notably GitLab, but not GitHub) will also exclude these files (no more 10k lines changed!) from the diffs when viewing online when doing this.
Yes, you can commit this file. From the npm's official docs:
package-lock.json
is automatically generated for any operations wherenpm
modifies either thenode_modules
tree, orpackage.json
. It describes the exact tree that was generated, such that subsequent installs are able to generate identical trees, regardless of intermediate dependency updates.This file is intended to be committed into source repositories[.]
Disable package-lock.json globally
type the following in your terminal:
npm config set package-lock false
this really work for me like magic
Yes, it's a standard practice to commit package-lock.json
.
The main reason for committing package-lock.json
is that everyone in the project is on the same package version.
Pros:
Cons:
npm install
won't make sure that everyone in the project is on the same package version. npm ci
will help with this.
All answers say "YES" but that also depend of the project, the doc says:
One key detail about package-lock.json is that it cannot be published, and it will be ignored if found in any place other than the toplevel package.
This mean that you don't need to publish on npm your package-lock.json
for dependency but you need to use package-lock.json
in your repo to lock the version of your test dependency, build dependencies…
However, If your are using lerna for managing projects with multiple packages, you should put the package.json
only on the root of your repo, not in each subpackage are created with npm init
. You will get something like that :
.git
lerna.json
package.json
package-lock.json <--- here
packages/a/package.json
packages/a/lib/index.js
packages/b/package.json
packages/b/lib/index.js
My use of npm is to generate minified/uglified css/js and to generate the javascript needed in pages served by a django application. In my applications, Javascript runs on the page to create animations, some times perform ajax calls, work within a VUE framework and/or work with the css. If package-lock.json has some overriding control over what is in package.json, then it may be necessary that there is one version of this file. In my experience it either does not effect what is installed by npm install, or if it does, It has not to date adversely affected the applications I deploy to my knowledge. I don't use mongodb or other such applications that are traditionally thin client.
I remove package-lock.json from repo because npm install generates this file, and npm install is part of the deploy process on each server that runs the app. Version control of node and npm are done manually on each server, but I am careful that they are the same.
When npm install
is run on the server, it changes package-lock.json,
and if there are changes to a file that is recorded by the repo on the server, the next deploy WONT allow you to pull new changes from origin. That is
you can't deploy because the pull will overwrite the changes that have been made to package-lock.json.
You can't even overwrite a locally generated package-lock.json with what is on the repo (reset hard origin master), as npm will complain when ever you issue a command if the package-lock.json does not reflect what is in node_modules due to npm install, thus breaking the deploy. Now if this indicates that slightly different versions have been installed in node_modules, once again that has never caused me problems.
If node_modules is not on your repo (and it should not be), then package-lock.json should be ignored.
If I am missing something, please correct me in the comments, but the point that versioning is taken from this file makes no sense. The file package.json has version numbers in it, and I assume this file is the one used to build packages when npm install occurs, as when I remove it, npm install complains as follows:
jason@localhost:introcart_wagtail$ rm package.json
jason@localhost:introcart_wagtail$ npm install
npm WARN saveError ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/jason/webapps/introcart_devtools/introcart_wagtail/package.json'
and the build fails, however when installing node_modules or applying npm to build js/css, no complaint is made if I remove package-lock.json
jason@localhost:introcart_wagtail$ rm package-lock.json
jason@localhost:introcart_wagtail$ npm run dev
> [email protected] dev /home/jason/webapps/introcart_devtools/introcart_wagtail
> NODE_ENV=development webpack --progress --colors --watch --mode=development
10% building 0/1 modules 1 active ...
Committing package-lock.json to the source code version control means that the project will use a specific version of dependencies that may or may not match those defined in package.json. while the dependency has a specific version without any Caret (^) and Tilde (~) as you can see, that's mean the dependency will not be updated to the most recent version. and npm install will pick up the same version as well as we need it for our current version of Angular.
Note : package-lock.json highly recommended to commit it IF I added any Caret (^) and Tilde (~) to the dependency to be updated during the CI.
Source: Stackoverflow.com