npm-try

🚆 Quickly try npm packages without writing boilerplate code.

npm-try provides a REPL interface for you to try NPM packages without writing any boilerplate code.

Simply run npm-try [packages ..] anywhere on the shell and npm-try will show a REPL interface which has all packages installed and assigned to variables.

Features

• Super easy to use!
• npm-try even defines variables for you
• Top-level await support (requires Node.js >= 10)

Install

$ npm install -g npm-try-cli

Examples

Wanna try the capitalize method of lodash package?

$ npm-try lodash
✔ const lodash = require('lodash')
> lodash.capitalize('hello world')
'Hello world'

Would like to try multiple packages at the same time?

$ npm-try lodash underscore
✔ const lodash = require('lodash')
✔ const underscore = require('underscore')
> lodash.first([1, 2, 3])
1
> underscore.first([1, 2, 3])
1

A previous version? You can specify versions with @ symbol (Missing the old days when the pluck still exists).:

$ npm-try lodash@3
✔ const lodash = require('lodash')
> lodash.pluck
[Function: pluck]

Asynchronous operations? await is supported out-of-the-box. Let's try ioredis:

$ npm-try ioredis
✔ const Redis = require('ioredis')
> const redis = new Redis()
undefined
> await redis.get('foo')
'123'

Create a Project

REPL is not enough sometimes when you want to write more code to test with packages. npm-try offers --out-dir/-o option to create a self-contained project so you can write your test code at the drop of a hat.

$ npm-try lodash -o try-lodash
✔ Installing lodash...
✔ The project created at /Users/luin/try-lodash

Limitations

Testing multiple versions of the same package is not supported. The following command will only have lodash@3 provided:

$ npm-try lodash@4 lodash@3
✔ const lodash = require('lodash')
✔ const lodash = require('lodash')
> lodash.VERSION
'3.10.1'

License

MIT