News

npm Puts Enterprise JavaScript Manager on AWS Cloud

• By David Ramel
• April 11, 2016

Rebounding from some unwanted publicity and developer angst, npm Inc. has simplified the process of using its enterprise-oriented JavaScript package manager in the cloud. npm Enterprise is now available on the Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS) cloud as an Amazon Machine Image (AMI).

The npm ("Node.js package manager") service helps JavaScript developers easily share packaged modules of code, which can be easily added to projects and managed via command-line tools.

The popularity it has reached among JavaScript developers was shown recently when an angry developer "unpublished" all his packages over a module naming squabble, leading to thousands of broken JavaScript builds worldwide. The company says more than 4 million developers use the service, which provided some 3,728,452,035 downloads in the past month.

The fiasco resulting from the "unpublishing" of JavaScript modules led to a mea culpa from npm Inc. and a change in its policies.

While some components of the system, such as free module registry, are open sourced, the paid enterprise offering helps organizational development teams share JavaScript modules behind a corporate firewall, and the company says it "seamlessly integrates with the tools and workflows your developers love, while maintaining total control over your code."

Although companies could previously use npm On-Site in the AWS cloud to run private npm registries and Web sites behind firewalls, the technology has been simplified and packaged in an AMI.

"In a previous blog post we showed you how easy it is to run npm Enterprise on Amazon Web Services," npm said in a blog post last Thursday. "Today, we're happy to announce the public availability of the npm Enterprise Amazon Machine Image (AMI). Now, it's even easier to run your own private npm registry and Web site on AWS.

"Using our AMI, there is nothing to install. Just launch an instance, configure it using the npm Enterprise admin Web UI, and you're done: It's a true point-and-click solution for sharing and managing private JavaScript packages within your company."

The npm Enterprise AMI -- a template containing software configuration for an OS, application server and applications -- is available in several AWS regions. The AMI runs on various flavors of Linux, including Ubuntu, CentOS and Red Hat. Complete documentation for running npm Enterprise in AWS is available here.

"We're continually striving to provide you the best solutions for distributing, discovering, and reusing your JavaScript code and packages," npm said. "We hope this AMI makes it just that much easier to leverage the same tools within your organization that work so well in open source communities around the world -- a concept we refer to as InnerSource."