
My introduction to using command line for third party package management actually came via Bower. Among the items useful for web design you’ll find packages such as:įor the purposes of this tutorial we’ll be using npm in conjunction with Node.js, however it is an independent entity that can be used with other systems such as the newly arrived IO.js.Īs a beginner I recommend following along with the tutorials using Node.js, but you may like to explore other options later. You might have heard of Node.js, a JavaScript based bag of goodies that can power everything from blog platforms, to coding IDEs, to media centres to entire operating systems.Īlong with an installation of Node.js comes the package manager npm, a tremendously useful system you’ll see utilized often throughout this series.Ĭontrary to what you might first think, npm does not stand for “Node Package Manager.” Officially it stands for “npm is not an acronym” and at the top of the site you’ll see little jokes come up every refresh like “never poke monkeys” and “newts parading majestically.”Īs of this moment npm provides access to and management for 127,664 packages which are designed for all different types of purposes. The two choices that are far and away the most popular among web designers right now are npm and Bower, and those are the systems you’ll be learning to use today. In order to get started using the command line to handle third party packages, the first thing you’re going to need is a “package management system”, or “package manager”. Note: If you haven’t followed the first tutorial in this series, Grasping the Basics, you’ll find it helpful to go through that before commencing here.
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In this tutorial you’ll learn how to make handling third party packages a matter of just typing a handful of two to five word commands. Now there’s a better way, using command line powered package managers. Sure, we’ve been making it work, but it’s time consuming and its unwieldiness often leaves projects using out of date code.



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Increasingly, we also use third party packages as part of development processes, like compilers for CSS preprocessors or code cleaning and compression tools to maximize the speed our sites load and run at.ĭealing with all these packages can quickly become a mess of manual downloading, file transferring, and updating. We load in third party CSS from projects like Bootstrap and Foundation, and scripts like jQuery and Modernizr. We commonly use third party packages in web design projects.
