The company behind JavaScript’s immensely popular npm package manger has moved its enterprise offering to Amazon Web Services Inc. (AWS).
npm Inc. announced last week that the service is now available as an Amazon Machine Image. The npm service stands for “Node.js Package Manager”, and allows JavaScript developers to easily share packaged code modules. These can be added to projects quickly and managed via command line tools.
Its widespread popularity in JavaScript was demonstrated recently by a disgruntled JavaScript developer who “unpublished” all of his modules due to a module naming dispute. This led to thousands of broken JavaScript script builds all over the world. According to the company, more than 4,000,000 developers use the service. The service has received 3,728,452,035 downloaded in the last month.
Although some components of the system are open-sourced, such as the free module registry, npm Inc. also offers a paid enterprise-oriented service called npm Enterprise. It allows developers to share JavaScript modules behind a corporate firewall. The company claims that it “seamlessly integrates” with the tools and workflows that developers love while still maintaining complete control over your code.
Although companies used npm Onsite in the AWS cloud to manage private npm registers and Web sites behind firewalls previously, the technology has been simplified.
[Click on the image to see a larger version.] Installing the npm Enterprise (source: npm). “In a previous post we showed how easy it was to run npm Enterprise using Amazon Web Services,” npm wrote in a blog last Thursday. “Today, we are happy to announce the availability of the npm Enterprise Amazon Machine Image. It’s now even easier to manage your private npm registry on AWS.
“Using our AMI, there’s nothing to install. You can launch an instance and configure it using the Web UI of npm Enterprise admin. This is a simple solution to share and manage private JavaScript packages within your organization.
The npm Enterprise AMI — which contains software configurations for an OS, application server, and applications — can be found in many AWS regions. The AMI works on a variety of Linux flavors, including CentOS, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and CentOS. You can find complete documentation on running npm Enterprise in AWS here.
“We’re constantly striving to provide the best solutions for distributing and discovering JavaScript code and packages,” said npm. “We hope that this AMI will make it easier for you to leverage the same tools in your organization that are so successful in open source communities around world — a concept that we call InnerSource.”
