News

npm Enterprise JavaScript Package Manager Now on AWS

• By David Ramel
• 04/11/2016

The company behind the enormously popular npm package manager for JavaScript has put its enterprise offering on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud.

For the first time, the service is available as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI), npm Inc. said last week. Standing for "Node.js package manager," the npm service helps JavaScript developers easily share packaged modules of code, which can be quickly added to projects and managed via command-line tools.

The ubiquity it has reached in the JavaScript community was evidenced recently when a disgruntled developer "unpublished" all his modules over a module naming squabble, leading to thousands of broken JavaScript builds around the world. The company says more than 4 million developers use the service, which provided some 3,728,452,035 downloads in the past month.

While some components of the system, such as free module registry, are freely open sourced, npm Inc. also provides a paid enterprise-oriented service, called npm Enterprise. It helps organizational development teams share JavaScript modules behind a corporate firewall, and the company says it "seamlessly integrates with the tools and workflows your developers love, while maintaining total control over your code."

Although companies could previously use npm On-Site in the AWS cloud to run private npm registries and Web sites behind firewalls, the technology has been simplified and packaged in an AMI.

"In a previous blog post we showed you how easy it is to run npm Enterprise on Amazon Web Services," npm said in a blog post last Thursday. "Today, we're happy to announce the public availability of the npm Enterprise Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Now, it's even easier to run your own private npm registry and Web site on AWS.

"Using our AMI, there is nothing to install. Just launch an instance, configure it using the npm Enterprise admin Web UI, and you're done: It's a true point-and-click solution for sharing and managing private JavaScript packages within your company."

The npm Enterprise AMI -- a template containing software configuration for an OS, application server and applications -- is available in several AWS regions. The AMI runs on various flavors of Linux, including Ubuntu, CentOS and Red Hat. Complete documentation for running npm Enterprise in AWS is available here.

"We're continually striving to provide you the best solutions for distributing, discovering, and reusing your JavaScript code and packages," npm said. "We hope this AMI makes it just that much easier to leverage the same tools within your organization that work so well in open source communities around the world -- a concept we refer to as InnerSource."