I am looking for a command that will list the names of global modules that I have npm link'd to local copies, also listing the local path.
In fact, a list of all globally installed modules would be even better, with the npm link'd ones flagged somehow.
Did you try just listing the node_modules directory contents (e.g. ls -l node_modules | grep ^l)? They're normal symlinks.
If you really need to find all symlinks, you could try something like find / -type d -name "node_modules" 2>/dev/null | xargs -I{} find {} -type l -maxdepth 1 | xargs ls -l.
To list all globally linked modules, this works (documentation https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/ls):
npm ls -g --depth=0 --link=true
I had to update the version of npm on my machine first, though:
npm install npm@latest -g
A better alternative to parsing ls is to use find like this:
find . -type l
You can use -maxdepth 1 to only process the first directory level:
find . -maxdepth 1 -type l
You can use -ls for additional info.
For instance, for finding node modules that are npm linked:
find node_modules -maxdepth 1 -type l -ls
Here's an article why parsing ls is not the best idea
If you want a nice colored output from npm list, you may like:
\ls -F node_modules | sed -n 's/@$//p' | xargs npm ls -g --depth 0
which gives in my current playground dir:
+-- color@0.11.1
+-- grunt@0.4.5
+-- http-server@0.8.5
+-- jsdom@8.0.2
+-- jsonfile@2.2.3
+-- underscore@1.8.3
+-- xmlserializer@0.3.3
`-- zombie@4.2.1
It makes a few assumptions but it should work in most cases, or be easy to adapt with the explanations below.
\ls to bypass possible aliases on your ls command-F option adds an '@' indicator for linkssed command selects those links and removes the indicatorxargs part passes previous output as arguments to npm ...npm is invoked with
list or ls to list modules with versions
ll to get details about each listed module.-g for the global modules and--depth 0 for a shallow listing (optional)--long false (default with 'list'). Issue: for some reason npm gives extraneous entries for me at the moment (non colored). They would be those I had "npm unlink"ed.
For "a list of all globally installed modules" in current npm path, you just do
npm list -g
For further needs you may want to have a look at
npm help folders
You cannot follow symlinks backwards unless you scan your whole filesystem and (then that's not a npm specific question).
For quickly finding files and directories by name, I use locate which works on an index rebuilt usually once a day.
locate '*/node_modules'
and start working from there (you may want to refine the search with --regexp option.
I found this question after I also wrote my own tool, here it is for completeness: npm-list-linked.
It will recursively follow all linked packages down in the hierarchy as well, at my work we sometimes may have npm link 2-3 levels deep and this way you can see exactly which are local and which ones are not, avoids surprises.
$ npm-list-linked
Linked packages in /home/user/projects/some-project/
@prefix/package 0.2.7
other-package 0.1.2
I made a Node.js module that uses fs to check for symlinks made by npm link or otherwise.
https://www.npmjs.com/package/symlinked
var symlinked = require("symlinked")
console.log(symlinked.names())
I see myself and others having this same question a lot. I wrote a small CLI for myself called link-status to display this info, it may help others out too! Check it out here!
find `npm root -g` -maxdepth 2 -type l
to show global links, including namespaced packages.
@andrew's answer works some of the time:
npm ls -g --depth=0 --link=true
but blew up on peer dep errors for me on some occasions. Hope that helps someone!
