Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been diving deep into the world of Browserify. It felt a little bit strange to use it in the beginning but now I’ve really fallen in love with the CommonJS way of handling dependencies. One thing that’s kind of a bummer though is that far from everything is available on npm¹. Thankfully I discovered a nice little tool called napa.

napa is a “helper for installing repos without a package.json with npm”. It basically does a git clone on a repository² directly into the node_modules folder. A basic setup in a package.json file looks like this:

{
  "scripts": {
    "install": "napa user/repo"
  }
}

And if we want to clone more than just a single repository, we can do this:

{
  "scripts": {
    "install": "napa"
  },
  "napa": {
    "foo": "user/repo",
    "bar": "user/repo"
  }
}

Using code from the master branch is not always a good idea but luckily we can also specify what tag, branch or commit we want to use:

{
  "scripts": {
    "install": "napa"
  },
  "napa": {
    "foo": "user/repo#v1.2.3",
    "bar": "user/repo#branch",
    "baz": "user/repo#347259472813400c7a982690acaa516292a8be40"
  }
}

You might be thinking “this is neat, but can’t I just use Bower”? Absolutely, but one thing that I like about this approach is that your dependencies stays in one place. There’s also a lot of code out there that’s not registered on either npm or in Bower’s registry.

Also, instead of having to do something like this to require a dependency:

var foo = require('./bower_components/foo/dist/foo');

We can now do this:

var foo = require('foo/dist/foo');

Much better!