There has been a lot of discussion in the JavaScript community lately about the merits of Npx, a tool released by npm, Inc., versus using the good old faithful npm command line interface. While both have their advocates, in this post, we’ll take a closer look at what each tool is best used for and when you might want to consider using one over the other.

1. Introduction

2. What is npx?

3. What is npm?

4. Npx vs npm: Which is better?

5. Conclusion

Introduction

In the world of JavaScript, there are two widely used package managers: npm and npx. Both enable developers to install, update, and manage dependencies in their projects. But what’s the difference between the two? In short, npx is a tool that comes with npm, and it’s designed for Easier installation and management of dependencies. With npx, you don’t need to worry about creating and managing a project directory, as npx will do this for you. In addition, npx can also help you install dependencies more quickly and easily. So, if you’re looking for a faster, easier way to manage your project dependencies, npx is the way to go.

What is npx ?

npx is a tool intended to help round out the experience of using packages from the npm registry — the same way npm makes it super easy to install and manage dependencies hosted on the registry, npx makes it easy to use CLI tools and other executables hosted on the registry. It greatly simplifies a number of things that, until now, required a bit of ceremony to do with plain npm.

For the past couple of years, the npm ecosystem has been moving more and more towards installing tools as project-local devDependencies, instead of requiring users to install them globally. This means that tools like mocha, grunt, and bower, which were once primarily installed globally on a system, can now have their versions managed on a per-project basis. It also means that all you need to do to get an npm-based project up and running is to make sure you have node+npm on your system, clone the git repo, and do npm it to run install and test. Since npm run-script adds local binaries to path, this works just fine!

npx gives you what I think is the best solution: $ npx mocha is all you need to do to use your local installation. If you go an extra step and configure the shell auto-fallback (more on this below), then $ mocha inside a project directory will do the trick for you!

For bonus points, npx has basically no overhead if invoking an already-installed binary — it’s clever enough to load the code for the tool directly into the current running node process! This is about as fast as this sort of thing gets, and makes it a perfectly acceptable tool for scripting.

What is npm?

NPM stands for Node Package Manager and is one of the multiple package managers (others include Yarn, Bower, etc.) available for the Javascript programming language. Furthermore, it’s the default package manager for Node.js.

NPM has a command-line client, which is generally how you install packages. What seems magical is how NPM knows what to download. All you do is give the name of the package you’d like, and NPM knows where to get it from. This is because NPM has an online database of public and paid-for private packages called the NPM registry.

So whenever you type in something like:

$ npm install styled-components

It will look for styled-components as the key and find where to download the package from the online database. NPM takes care of downloading and installing Styled Components for you.

Imagine having to manually download libraries such as React, Redux, Styled Components to get your project running. You’d have to check each package’s version number and get the correct dependencies as well. That doesn’t really sound like time well-spent for a developer.

That’s where NPM comes in, as a software tool, and helps us, developers, out. We no longer have to manage third-party packages for our project manually. It’s all been made easy with NPM.

Thanks, NPM.

Npx vs npm: Which is better?

The command npm is used to download JavaScript packages from Node Package Manager, and npx is used to execute JavaScript packages downloaded this way.

This command will download the NPM package create-react-app to a subdirectory of the current working directory named node_modules:

npm install create-react-app

This command will execute the NPM package create-react-app with the name argument myreactapp, creating a bare-bones React app in the subdirectory myreactapp:

npx create-react-app myreactapp

Npm is a tool that use to install packages. Npx is a tool that use to execute packages.

Packages used by npm are installed globally. You have to care about pollution in the long term while packages used by npx are not installed globally. You don’t have to worry about for pollution in the long term.

Conclusion

In conclusion, we can see that there are some clear differences between npm and npx. npx has some clear advantages over npm, such as being much faster and easier to use. However, we can also see that npm has some advantages as well, such as being more established and having a larger community.

Thanks for reading. 😄

Ayush Dixit