I am not happy with the official npm documentation as  I never find quickly what I am looking for. So I decided to write a short npm cheat sheet with the most often commands I use.

Get npm help

npm -h or npm -h

Generate package.json in a module directory, based on npm parameters.

npm init
npm init -y (accept all default answers)

Install a package and also update package.json with the installed version and package name.

npm install --save
npm install @1.8.2 --save --save-exact (specific version)

Install a package and also update package.json with the installed version and package name, but into the devDependencies section.

npm install --save-dev

Uninstall package (A nice thing about npm is you can always just rm -rf ./node_modules/)

npm uninstall --save

List installed packages with dependency tree depth of zero.

npm ls --depth 0

List outdated libraries compared to currently installed node_modules.

npm outdated

Update dependencies.

npm update
npm update --prod (only prod dependencies)
npm update --dev (only dev dependencies)

List all npm configuration flags.

npm config ls -l

Setting, getting and deleting defaults.

npm set 'value'
npm get 
npm config delete 

Update the global npm version.

npm update npm -g (run this command with admin privileges)

⇒ Note that this is not working under windows. The best way to update npm is to install npm-windows-upgrade and do the update with this tool.

npm install -g npm-windows-upgrade
npm-windows-upgrade

npm shortcuts.

https://docs.npmjs.com/misc/config#shorthands-and-other-cli-niceties