npm search

Search for packages

Synopsis

npm search [-l|--long] [--json] [--parseable] [--no-description] [search terms ...]

aliases: s, se, find

Description

Search the registry for packages matching the search terms. npm search performs a linear, incremental, lexically-ordered search through package metadata for all files in the registry. If color is enabled, it will further highlight the matches in the results.

Additionally, using the --searchopts and --searchexclude options paired with more search terms will respectively include and exclude further patterns. The main difference between --searchopts and the standard search terms is that the former does not highlight results in the output and can be used for more fine-grained filtering. Additionally, both of these can be added to .npmrc for default search filtering behavior.

Search also allows targeting of maintainers in search results, by prefixing their npm username with =.

If a term starts with /, then it's interpreted as a regular expression and supports standard JavaScript RegExp syntax. A trailing / will be ignored in this case. (Note that many regular expression characters must be escaped or quoted in most shells.)

A Note on caching

Configuration

description

Default: true
Type: Boolean

Used as --no-description, disables search matching in package descriptions and suppresses display of that field in results.

json

Default: false
Type: Boolean

Output search results as a JSON array.

parseable

Default: false
Type: Boolean

Output search results as lines with tab-separated columns.

long

Default: false
Type: Boolean

Display full package descriptions and other long text across multiple lines. When disabled (default) search results are truncated to fit neatly on a single line. Modules with extremely long names will fall on multiple lines.

searchopts

Default: ""
Type: String

Space-separated options that are always passed to search.

searchexclude

Default: ""
Type: String

Space-separated options that limit the results from search.

searchstaleness

Default: 900 (15 minutes)
Type: Number

The age of the cache, in seconds, before another registry request is made.

registry

Default: https://registry.npmjs.org/
Type: url

Search the specified registry for modules. If you have configured npm to point to a different default registry, such as your internal private module repository, npm search will default to that registry when searching. Pass a different registry url such as the default above in order to override this setting.