Making a package.json from exact installed npm package versions

Attention conservation notice: Google-food for nodejs users.

It's easy to get a list of just the packages you directly depend on:

npm list --depth=0

However, there's no built-in way to get npm list to output results in package.json format. Here's a little shell recipe:

npm list --depth=0 \
  |tail +2 \
  |sed '/^\s*$/d' \
  |gawk -F ' ' '{print $2}' \
  |gawk -F '@' '\
     NR > 1 { printf ",\n" } \
     { printf "\"%s\": \"%s\"", $1, $2 } \
     ENDFILE { printf "\n" }'

This isn't a complete package.json, but it's a format that can easily be copied into one, via a second shell recipe or whatever else you like. (If your pipe-fu is strong you can probably figure out how to extend this to do the whole package.json in a one-liner.)

Motivation: When you npm install --save or npm install --save-dev, npm inserts packages with "the default semver operator" by default. It's easy to forget to pass --save-exact; or, if you're just doing exploratory hacking, you might not even want --save-exact. But when you're ready to cut a build for deployment, you need to capture exact package versions, because semver is basically bullshit can't be relied upon. Hence the recipe above, which can be used to generate or update the dependencies section of the package.json in a deploy directory.