npm-http-server
npm-http-server is a small HTTP server that serves up files from npm packages.
Installation
$ npm install npm-http-server
Configuration and Usage
Use createServer to create a server instance, passing it the options it needs to connect to npm:
import { createServer } from 'npm-http-server'
const server = createServer({
registryURL: 'https://registry.npmjs.org', // The URL of the npm registry, defaults to the public registry
bowerBundle: '/bower.zip' // A special pathname for generating Bower bundles, defaults to "/bower.zip"
})
server.listen(8080)server is a standard node HTTP server.
If you'd like to use npm-http-server as part of a larger site, using e.g. a framework like express, you can use the createRequestHandler function directly. As its name suggests, this function returns another function that can be used as the request handler in a standard node HTTP server. This function accepts the same options as createServer.
import express from 'express'
import { createRequestHandler } from 'npm-http-server'
const app = express()
app.use(express.static('public'))
app.use(createRequestHandler())
// ...URL Format
In npm-http-server, the URL is the API. The server recognizes URLs in the format /package@version/path/to/file where:
package The @scope/name of an npm package (scope is optional)
version The version, version range, or tag
/path/to/file The path to a file in that package (optional, defaults to main module)
Bower Support
To get a Bower bundle from a package that supports it use the /bower.zip file path. The zip archive that Bower needs is created dynamically based on the config in bower.json. The archive contains bower.json and all files listed in its main section. For convenience, the version number is automatically replaced with the one from package.json so there is no need to manually update it.
Please note: We do NOT recommend JavaScript libraries use Bower. It was originally written to solve the problem of bundling CSS and other static assets together with JavaScript in a single package. However, that problem is much more ably solved by bundlers like webpack and Browserify at build time. Additionally, Bower requires JavaScript libraries to check their build into GitHub (see why this is bad) and publish to the Bower registry, both of which are extra overhead that can be avoided by publishing just the source to npm and using a postinstall script to generate the build.