generate-package-json-from-node-modules

A script to generate package.json dependencies from an existing node_modules directory

Use case

• You have a project with a node_modules directory.
• There is either no package-lock.json or it is out of sync with the actual versions installed (perhaps npm install was used instead of npm ci)
• You want to make sure you can build the exact same node_modules at the exact same versions.
• npm init is not working this out for you automatically. (Perhaps some meta data has been stripped breaking that functionality?)

How to use

$ php generate.php /path/to/node_modules

This will output a json string of dependencies and exact versions, copy this into your existing package.json. It is not perfect to specify exact versions in a package.json but at least we can verify we are building the same node_modules directory.

It is possible this script has generated some package names which aren't actually available for install directly. For example bs-recipes-server seems to be part of bs-recipes. We need to remove these packages from package.json for npm install to work.

$ php remove-invalid-packages.php /Users/ampersand/src/project/package.json
Working directory: /Users/ampersand/src/project
npm install 2>&1
Trying to remove bs-recipes-server ... SUCCESS
npm install 2>&1
audited 1769 packages in 11.783s
DONE

Once you have npm install working you will have a package-lock.json which is valid and locked. You can probably remove the overly verbose items from package.json and use npm ci to build the project from this point onwards.

rm -rf node_modules
rm package-lock.json
npm install
# You have a valid package-lock.json! Tidy up your package.json file and use `npm ci` from this point forward