GitHub has confirmed an agreement to procure npm Inc, the organisation which operates the npm repository relied upon by 12 million JavaScript developers. The operation of the npm team over the last ten years, with participation from hundreds of thousands of open-source programmers and maintainers, made npm a platform to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads each month.
“We at GitHub are happy to be part of the next chapter of npm’s story, and support npm proceeding to scale to meet the demands of the fast-expanding JavaScript community,” Nat Freidman, CEO of GitHub wrote. For the millions of JavaScript coders who utilise the public npm registry each day, npm will always be open and free to use, according to Nat.
What is npm that GitHub Acquired It?
npm consists of a command-line client that interacts with a remote registry. It enables users to employ and distribute JavaScript modules that are accessible on the registry. npm can manage packages, which are local dependencies of a distinct project, and also the web JavaScript tools.
npm is a package manager for JavaScript programming language, which has grown to be the primary package handler for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js.
The registry can be used via the client, and the open packages can be accessed and explored through the npm website. The package manager and the registry are maintained by npm, Inc.
How This Acquisition Adds Value
The acquisition leads to an added important part of open-source system infrastructure under the power of GitHub’s owner, Microsoft. The acquisition is great for the JavaScript ecosystem, which can accelerate further advancements for JavaScript applications.
At the same time, Github’s focus will be to advance in the registry infrastructure and platform. “The Javascript ecosystem requires a rock-solid registry. We will secure the expenses needed to guarantee that npm is fast, reliable, and scalable,” Nat added.
Some bigger features that will be soon integrated are Workspaces and enhancements to the publishing and multi-factor authentication enablement.
Also, blending GitHub with npm will enhance the safety of the open-source software and allow users to track change from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version that made it.
Github is expected to take npm security forward, given so many Javascript developers and websites rely on npm.
Javascript Popularity
The JavaScript ecosystem is huge and expanding quickly. The contribution of millions of JavaScript developers is evident every day in the work that is created with npm and Node.js
Node.js allows web coders to create multiple kinds of server-side applications using JavaScript. Because the JavaScript apps perform within the Node.js runtime, they are able to run smoothly on most OS and web servers.
JavaScript is a resilient and robust programming language that is executed constantly by different web browsers. Apart from HTML and CSS, it’s a fundamental component of the web.
The programming language is used so commonly that it has been ranked as the most used language according to StackOverflow’s Developer Survey for seven years in a row.
