dry-npm v0.2.0

DRY - Use npm across multiple projects without repeating yourself

Get it

npm i -g dry-npm

The copy/paste madness

Because companies and other groups have bunch of package.json attributes that are the same across all npm projects. Those attributes must be maintained using copy/past across all projects. This is wrong !

We believe that those attributes should be easily distributed and updated across projects.

Do not repeat yourself

dry is a stupid npm wrapper allowing any package.json to extend a parent file. The parent file can be located on the system or simply inside a published npm module.

How does it work

On each dry command, dry:

• creates a merged package.json based on the provided package-dry.json
• runs the npm command
• apply the possible package.json modifications made by npm to package-dry.json
• removes package.json

package.json is always removed to make sure that nobody will execute a pure npm command in a dry project.

Inheritance in action

Parent project

package-dry.json

{
  "name": "parent",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1",
    "foo": "npm help"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}

Child project

package-dry.json

{
  "name": "child",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC",
  "dry": {
    "extends": "parent/package-dry.json",
    "dependencies": {
      "parent": "1.0.0"
    }
  }
}

package-dry.json

To do that, dry introduces a file named package-dry.json. package-dry.json replaces package.json in your dry projects. Of course, it can contain all the attributes of package.json with the addition of an attribute called dry.

package-dry.json dry attribute has 2 optional attributes:

• extends - The parent of the current dry package
• dependencies - The dependencies needed to resolve the file pointed by extends. Those dependencies will not be saved to your project.

dry commands

dry proxy all the received arguments to npm. Just take your usual npm commands and replace the word npm with dry.