How To Speed Up Continuous Integration Build With New NPM CI And package-lock.json

It never hurts to get some more speed (📷 by chuttersnap)

While very controversial, the recent npm release 5.7.0 brought some amazing features which will have noticeable positive impact on your development workflow!

From official changelog…

The new npm ci command installs from your lock-file ONLY. If your package.json and your lock-file are out of sync then it will report an error.It works by throwing away your node_modules and recreating it from scratch. Beyond guaranteeing you that you’ll only get what is in your lock-file it’s also much faster (2x-10x!) than npm install

Generate and use package-lock.json file

I have hard time guessing what ratio of developer is using package-lock.json already. It wasn’t behaving intuitively when first introduced and I suppose many people kept on deleting the file to prevent unnecessary headache.

Current behavior is luckily much more in line with what is expected by most developers. Running npm install will generate package-lock.json file if it didn’t exist with the versions from current node_modules . Manual bumping of versions in the package.json will result in correct version bumps in already existing package-lock.json when using npm install.