Some people use --save
option when installing packages with npm
. For example, it is common to see the following command:
npm install packagename --save
What does the --save
option do? And why do some people never use it?
npm or node package manager is a package manager for node.
When you download a package using the npm
command, it installs the packages in the node_modules
folder and adds the installed module as a dependency in your package.json
file.
Prior to npm 5.0.0, npm installed the packages in node_modules
but didn’t add them as a dependency by default.
If you wanted to save the module as a dependency in the package.json
file, you had to do it using the --save
or -S
option.
As of npm 5.0.0, you no longer need to use this option. Now npm saves all installed packages as dependencies by default.
If you want to save a package as a development-only dependency, you can do so by using the --save-dev
or -D
flag.
A few other options are also available that allow you to control how a package is saved using npm install
. You can read about them on the official docs.