npm tricks part 1: Get list of globally installed packages

Quick question: does anybody of you folks know the exact amount of globally installed npm packages in your workstation? Probably not.

This is especially true for Node.js/npm newbies, who often try the most popular packages installing them globally, without even defining them in their package.json files; however, this may be useful even for more advanced Node.js developer, who may not know every npm CLI trick.

So, this is it:

Let’s break this line down a little bit, shall we?

• npm: the Node package manager command line tool
• list -g: display a tree of every package found in the user’s folders (without the -g option it only shows the current directory’s packages)
• — depth 0 / — depth=0: avoid including every package’s dependencies in the tree view

Here’s a sample result:

Congratulations, you now know how to get a list of all the npm packages you have installed on your machine!

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