npm-registry

npm-registry

To keep myself sane while working with The npm Registry I decided to write my own library to deal with all the incomplete, inconsistent and horrible data structures that are available in The npm Registry. NoSQL is nice and all, but that doesn't mean you should leave your data unmaintained. This library is never meant as a full replacement of the npm-registry-client which the npm bin file is using. Unless those API's and methods are so poorly implemented or designed that I get a mental breakdown, then yes, this will become a full and usable replacement of the above said module.

This module is written with high availability in mind. The main reason behind this is that npm Inc. has added a lot of moving parts on top of the registry which frequently breaks. In order to combat this I've implemented automatic downgrading to multiple registries. If all other supplied registries fail to work an automatic exponential randomized back off algorithm kicks in place and retries the query once more. This functionality is all provided by the awesome mana package which provides core functionality for writing sane api-clients.

Installation

npm install --save npm-registry

And that is all you need to type in your terminal in order to prevent becoming terminal. The --save tells npm to automatically add the package and latest version to your package.json.

Packages

The .packages endpoints allows you to retrieve detailed information about npm packages. The following methods are implemented:

• npm.packages.get: Basic module information.
• npm.packages.depended: List modules that depend on the given module.
• npm.packages.starred: List users who starred the module.
• npm.packages.keyword: List packages who use this keyword.
• npm.packages.releases: All releases for a module.
• npm.packages.release: The latest release.
• npm.packages.details: Highly detailed information about the package.

Users

The .users endpoint allows you to retrieve detailed information about a given npm account. The following methods are implemented:

• npm.users.list: All packages released by the user.
• npm.users.starred: Packages that the user has starred.
• npm.users.get: Get the profile information.

Normalization

As the internal data structure is do damn awkward in npm we need to normalize the data structures before we can even try to use it. While this normalization is part automatically done for you internally there might be use cases where you want to manually normalize a given dataset.

The normalize module can be required directly using:

var normalize = require('npmjs/normalize');

The normalize variable now contains two different functions, users and packages. As you might have guessed, these functions normalize different data structures. The function accepts a simple single argument which is the data object that you receive from the npm registry endpoints.

data = normalize.packages(data);

License

MIT