Responsible approach when working with package managers (nuget, npm)

The article discusses package managers in general and separately NPM and NuGet.

Package managers are a programming language tool for creating project environments and simply importing external dependencies. You don't have to reinvent the wheel and you can make the most of the tools at your disposal. When working on a project or library, you can "pack" your project and publish it to others.

You can specify dependencies, package name, author, tags, and version number. All this helps online repositories store your package and allows others to find your project. In addition, by allowing you to create your own packages, developers are forced to think about how their package will be used and implemented, which allows you to create better and more recyclable packages.

Without modern package managers, you'll need a state-of-the-art tool to combine your packages once they're released. You'll also run into problems when you want to upgrade your packages to the latest versions. This will be difficult enough for large projects with many packages. Package managers make it easier to work with packages. They automate most of the tasks associated with using packages during development.

The category of package managers of the language level includes npm, yarn, pip, go mod, maven, gradle, wapm. There are also system-level package managers such as apt-get, yum, dnf, apk. But today we will only talk about two such package managers: nuget and npm.

NuGet

NuGet is a package manager that supports projects created using the .NET platform. For example, projects written in C #. NuGet is part of the Visual Studio installation, the most common integrated development environment for writing .NET code. It can also be added as an extension to Visual Studio's popular code editor.

When used in Visual Studio, developers view packages using the NuGet Package Manager search tool. Public packages are retrieved from the NuGet repository, and developers also specify private repositories.

In Visual Studio, developers can use NuGet to learn packages through a graphical user interface, although they also have the ability to interact using the command line interface. Developers can see the names, versions, and descriptions of what each package does before deciding which packages to install in their project.

NuGet tracks project dependencies in the project's packages.config file, an XML file that lists the ID of each dependency and the version number. Unlike npm, NuGet allows you to include only one version of a dependency in each project, and Package Manager automatically resolves any version conflicts.

Node Package Manager (NPM)

Package management was never just about NuGet. If you are a developer working with node.js, JavaScript, or any of its variants, you can use Team Services to place private npm packages next to your NuGet packages.

This package manager helps developers manage and install JavaScript packages. It was originally designed specifically to support Node projects, but it can now help with any JavaScript dependencies. It is an extremely powerful platform used to develop applications for online chats, video streaming sites, one-page apps, and many other I/O intensive web and web applications.

Developers can install npm by installing Node.js and the npm command line client to interact with npm. There are several options available when using npm to manage JavaScript packages. Developers either install packages individually using the npm install command and entering the name of a specific package, or create a package.json file that lists all project dependencies. They then use the npm install command to install any dependencies that are not already in the project.

While developers run the npm install command to install individual dependencies in the same folder as their JavaScript project, any dependencies they install individually are also added to the package.json file for ease of maintenance. Developers are not required to resolve dependency conflicts, and projects can include multiple different versions of the same dependency.

The npm package manager also allows developers to distinguish between dependencies that must be associated with code to run in a production environment and dependencies that are only needed in a development environment and marked in the package.json file as devDependencies. Code testing environments can be listed under devDependencies, but not dependencies used for production.

NuGet vs. NPM

NuGet is focused mainly on .NET, NPM are JavaScript package managers.

The first goal of npm is to support Node.js: a well-known JavaScript server. Npm is a command line tool and will be more convenient for you to use it. How does Visual Studio handle NuGet? NuGet packages are managed by the Nuget Package Manager both visually and using the Package Manager console.

Npm generates a list of actions to be performed on the tree on disk. It is expected that all of them, with the exception of life cycle scenarios, will be able to act independently of each other without interfering with each other. This means, for example, that you need to be able to update b in a→b→c without reinstalling c with npm.

The NuGet Package Manager user interface in Visual Studio for Windows makes it easy to install, remove, and update NuGet packages in projects and solutions. The Package Manager UI is not part of Visual Studio Code.

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