npm-consider

Check npm package dependencies size, licenses and impact on your package before installing it 🤔

If you like it, please, ⭐️ this repo!

Features

• calculate dependencies size recursively
• show dependencies license policy for linking
• calculates impact on current package
• show full dependency graph
• analyzes packages without downloading it

Installing

npm install -g npm-consider

Note: this tool is more useful when you colleagues also use it 😉

Usage

npm-consider has the same arguments as npm install:

npm-consider install --save express

The command recursively requests packages info from npm and builds dependencies graph. Size of the package determined via HEAD request to tarball download URL.

Licence type

npm-consider calculates license type for every dependency. The type defines license policy for linking as a librtary. Data collected from Comparison of free and open-source software licenses on Wikipedia.

• Public Domain and Permissive license allows you to do anything except sue the author
• Weakly Protective license have restriction to how can it be linked and combined with other licenses
• Protective or Copyleft dependency license requires dependent module to have a free license, which prevents it from being proprietary
• Network Protective same as Protective but also triggers with network interaction
• Uncategorized means that license was not found in a package info or was not categorised in terms of linking; feel free to contribute to license categorisation;

Note: that even permissive licenses have some restrictions. Check the following slide and article to learn about license compatibility:

The Free-Libre / Open Source Software (FLOSS) License Slide

Menu options

• Install runs npm install with the same arguments
• Impact takes onto account already installed dependencies and shows relative impact. It behaves differently, depending on --save or --save-dev option. The second one takes into account already installed dependencies and devDpenedencies.
• Details prints dependencies graph
• Skip cancels npm install; no changes in your project will apply.