GitHub URLs in package.json

package.json file in your node project contain (among others) links to the packages that your projects needs to run.

To add new package dependency, you can run npm add command:

 npm add chalk

And after that respective package will be added to the dependencies section of your package.json:

{
  "name": "sandbox",
  "main": "index.js",
  "dependencies": {
    "chalk": "^4.1.2"
  }
}

But what if instead of a published npm package I want to use a branch that is living on GitHub? Luckily package.json definition allows GitHub URLs. The syntax is one of:

github:[user]/[project]
github:[user]/[project]#[commit-sha]
github:[user]/[project]#[branch]
github:[user]/[project]#[tag]

The github: part is optional, but gives some context to your future self.

Where user and project you can extract from the GitHub URLs of respective repositories: https://github.com/[user]/[project]/

So for example to install commit 95d74cbe8d3df3674dec1445a4608d3288d8b73c of the package/project chalk (which happens to have GitHub user of the same name) I would have to specify:

{
  "name": "sandbox",
  "main": "index.js",
  "dependencies": {
    "chalk": "github:chalk/chalk#95d74cbe8d3df3674dec1445a4608d3288d8b73c"
  }
}

Semver

There is one more curious format that can be used in GitHub URLs and that is semver. The syntax is:

github:[user]/[project]#semver:[semver]"

So for example to install chalk with semver ^2.4.1 we should put following into our package.json:

{
  "name": "sandbox",
  "main": "index.js",
  "dependencies": {
    "chalk": "github:chalk/chalk#semver:^2.4.1"
  }
}

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