pacote

What is pacote?

Pacote is a Node.js library that provides a set of utilities for fetching and extracting npm packages. It is designed to handle various types of package sources, including the npm registry, tarballs, git repositories, and local directories. Pacote is often used internally by npm and other tools to manage package dependencies.

What are pacote's main functionalities?

Fetch Package Metadata

This feature allows you to fetch the metadata of a package from the npm registry. The code sample demonstrates how to fetch and log the metadata for the 'lodash' package.

const pacote = require('pacote');

async function fetchMetadata(packageName) {
  const manifest = await pacote.manifest(packageName);
  console.log(manifest);
}

fetchMetadata('lodash');

Extract Package Tarball

This feature allows you to fetch and extract the tarball of a package. The code sample demonstrates how to fetch the tarball for the 'lodash' package and save it to a file named 'lodash.tgz'.

const pacote = require('pacote');
const fs = require('fs');

async function extractTarball(packageName, destination) {
  const tarballStream = await pacote.tarball.stream(packageName);
  tarballStream.pipe(fs.createWriteStream(destination));
}

extractTarball('lodash', './lodash.tgz');

Fetch Package from Git Repository

This feature allows you to fetch a package directly from a git repository. The code sample demonstrates how to fetch and log the metadata for the 'lodash' package from its GitHub repository.

const pacote = require('pacote');

async function fetchFromGit(repoUrl) {
  const manifest = await pacote.manifest(repoUrl);
  console.log(manifest);
}

fetchFromGit('https://github.com/lodash/lodash.git');

Other packages similar to pacote

npm

The npm package itself provides functionalities for managing npm packages, including installing, updating, and removing packages. While npm is a full-fledged package manager, pacote focuses specifically on fetching and extracting packages.

yarn

Yarn is another package manager for JavaScript that offers similar functionalities to npm, including package fetching and dependency management. Yarn also provides a more deterministic dependency resolution compared to npm.

pnpm

pnpm is a fast, disk space-efficient package manager. It uses a content-addressable file system to store all files from all module directories on a disk. While pnpm focuses on efficient package management, pacote is more specialized in fetching and extracting packages.

README

pacote

NOTE: this package is still under heavy development. Please don't use it yet

pacote is a Node.js library for downloading npm-compatible packages. It supports all package specifier syntax that npm install and its ilk support. It transparently caches anything needed to reduce excess operations, using cacache.

Install

$ npm install --save pacote

Table of Contents

• Example
• Features
• Contributing
• API
  • manifest
  • extract
  • prefetch
  • options
  • clearMemoized

Example

const pacote = require('pacote')

pacote.manifest('pacote@^1').then(pkg => {
  console.log('package manifest for registry pkg:', pkg)
  // { "name": "pacote", "version": "1.0.0", ... }
})

pacote.extract('http://hi.com/pkg.tgz', './here').then(() => {
  console.log('remote tarball contents extracted to ./here')
})

Features

• Handles all package types npm does
• high-performance, reliable, verified local cache
• offline mode
• authentication support (private git, private npm registries, etc)
• github, gitlab, and bitbucket-aware
• semver range support for git dependencies

Contributing

The pacote team enthusiastically welcomes contributions and project participation! There's a bunch of things you can do if you want to contribute! The Contributor Guide has all the information you need for everything from reporting bugs to contributing entire new features. Please don't hesitate to jump in if you'd like to, or even ask us questions if something isn't clear.

API

> pacote.manifest(spec, [opts])

Fetches the manifest for a package. Manifest objects are similar and based on the package.json for that package, but with pre-processed and limited fields. The object has the following shape:

{
  "name": PkgName,
  "version": SemverString,
  "dependencies": { PkgName: SemverString },
  "optionalDependencies": { PkgName: SemverString },
  "devDependencies": { PkgName: SemverString },
  "peerDependencies": { PkgName: SemverString },
  "bundleDependencies": false || [PkgName],
  "bin": { BinName: Path },
  "_resolved": TarballSource, // different for each package type
  "_integrity": SubresourceIntegrityHash,
  "_shrinkwrap": null || ShrinkwrapJsonObj
}

Note that depending on the spec type, some additional fields might be present. For example, packages from registry.npmjs.org have additional metadata appended by the registry.

Example

pacote.manifest('pacote@1.0.0').then(pkgJson => {
  // fetched `package.json` data from the registry
})

> pacote.extract(spec, destination, [opts])

Extracts package data identified by <spec> into a directory named <destination>, which will be created if it does not already exist.

If opts.digest is provided and the data it identifies is present in the cache, extract will bypass most of its operations and go straight to extracting the tarball.

Example

pacote.extract('pacote@1.0.0', './woot', {
  digest: 'deadbeef'
}).then(() => {
  // Succeeds as long as `pacote@1.0.0` still exists somewhere. Network and
  // other operations are bypassed entirely if `digest` is present in the cache.
})

> pacote.prefetch(spec, [opts])

Fetches package data identified by <spec>, usually for the purpose of warming up the local package cache (with opts.cache). It does not return anything.

Example

pacote.prefetch('pacote@1.0.0', { cache: './my-cache' }).then(() => {
  // ./my-cache now has both the manifest and tarball for `pacote@1.0.0`.
})

> pacote.clearMemoized()

This utility function can be used to force pacote to release its references to any memoized data in its various internal caches. It might help free some memory.

pacote.manifest(...).then(() => pacote.clearMemoized)

> options

opts.integrity

If provided, pacote will confirm that the relevant integrity hash for each operation's results matches the given digest. The call will return EINTEGRITY if the check fails.

Additionally, pacote.extract will use this integrity string check the cache directly for matching contents before performing any other operations.

opts.cache

opts.cacheUid/opts.cacheGid

opts.uid/opts.gid

opts.scope

opts.registry

opts.@somescope:registry

opts.auth

opts.log

Default: silentNpmLog

An npmlog-compatible logger. Will be used to log various events at the levels specified by npmlog.