Consuming Node.js modules

In this recipe, we are going to learn how to consume npm modules from the public npm registry using the npm CLI.

Important note

Yarn is a popular alternative package manager for JavaScript and was created as an alternative to the npm CLI in 2016. When Yarn was released, npm did not have the package-lock.json feature to guarantee consistency of which specific versions of modules would be installed. This was one of the key features of Yarn. At the time of writing, the Yarn CLI offers a similar user experience to what the npm CLI provides. Yarn maintains a registry that is a reverse proxy to the npm registry. For more information about Yarn, check out their Getting Started Guides: https://yarnpkg.com/getting-started.

Getting ready

To get started, we first need to create a new directory to work in:

$ mkdir consuming-modules
$ cd consuming-modules

We will also need a file where we can attempt to execute the imported module:

$ touch require...