NodeJS : npm init with custom values

01 Mar 2018

npm init command is the simplest way to start a project, but filling answers to those questions are irritating. If we use npm init -y it will skip all the questions, but it will generate the package.json with npm default values. We have to update the author details, version and license later.

To make this easier we can set the author details, starting version and our favorite license in the .npmrc file so that next time we do npm init -y instead of npm default npm use .npmrc and fill the details.

npm config

We can use the npm config command to set those values to our global .npmrc.

npm config set init-author-name "Your name"
npm config set init-author-email "yourname@email.com"
npm config set init-author-url "http://example.com/"
npm config set init-license "MIT"

Now the .npmrc will have these configuration

init-author-name=Your name
init-author-email=yourname@email.com
init-author-url=http://example.com/
init-license=MIT

Next time when we do npm init -y this will set the author name as “Your name”, email as “yourname@email.com”, url as “http://example.com/” and license as “MIT”.

For more details on npm config check the official doc

Hope it helped.
Let me know if you have any feedback or corrections via comments

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