NAME¶

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 your terminal has color support, it will further highlight the matches in the results. This can be disabled with the config item color

Additionally, using the --searchopts and --searchexclude options paired with more search terms will 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 you can use them more fine-grained filtering. Additionally, you can add both of these to your config to change 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. In this case search will ignore a trailing / . (Note you must escape or quote many regular expression characters in most shells.)

Configuration¶

All of the following can be defined in a .npmrc file, or passed as parameters to the cli prefixed with -- (e.g. --json)

description¶

color¶

Used as --no-color, disables color highlighting of matches in the results.

json¶

Output search results as a JSON array.

parseable¶

Output search results as lines with tab-separated columns.

long¶

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

searchopts¶

Space-separated options that are always passed to search.

searchexclude¶

Space-separated options that limit the results from search.

registry¶

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 also default to that registry when searching.

A note on caching¶

The npm cli caches search results with the same terms and options locally in its cache. You can use the following to change how and when the cli uses this cache. See npm help cache for more on how the cache works.

prefer-online¶

Forces staleness checks for cached searches, making the cli look for updates immediately even for fresh search results.

prefer-offline¶

Bypasses staleness checks for cached searches. Missing data will still be requested from the server. To force full offline mode, use offline.

offline¶

Forces full offline mode. Any searches not locally cached will result in an error.

See Also¶