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Learning npm and apt package manager commands at once

· 3 min read
D Balaji
D Balaji
Lead Design Technologist

gift packages

You cannot be a professional developer without an encounter with Unix/Linux systems. Linux is the preferred operating system of choice for cloud machines. SSH is a magical technology to control the cloud machine without making a trip to the data center. All said but how to install and manage software on the Linux operating systems? The answer is Package Managers.

Why are you comparing npm and APT?​

I am comparing npm with apt because both implement the same interface called Package Managers. Might have sounded more Javaish but the point is that both npm and apt are package managers.

Familiarity with npm makes it easy to learn apt. Another easy way would be to compare the app store with apt however we do not execute commands on the app store. But the concept is the same, you can look up software, install it, upgrade it or even remove it.

What are the operations performed by package managers?​

The package manager is part of a package called Package management system. The package management system has a bunch of tools to perform operations on the software like maintaining a registry of available software, performing a lookup when searched for, notifying or maintaining versions of the software. For the node platform, we have npm, for python, it's pip, etc. Depending on the Linux OS the package managers vary.

What about GUI based package managers?​

I enjoy using GUI based package managers like synaptic package manager on my laptop but never on cloud computing because they do not have GUI. It's just SSH.

Package managers do CRUD?​

CRUD stands for Create Read Update Delete operations in general. Package managers help you similar, in place of creating we have install.

To create a package

npm - npm init apt - no equivalent command exists

To install a package(s)

npm - npm install apt - apt i

Multiple packages are separated with a space like `apt i pack1 pack2.

To install a package with a specific version. In npm, we use the same install command to reinstall the package. In apt, we pass --reinstall.

npm - npm install packageName@1.1.0 apt - apt i packageName=1.1.0

To remove a package

npm - npm remove packageName apt - apt remove packageName

To update a package

npm - npm update packageName apt - apt update packageName

To upgrade a package (a breaking release can be considered an upgrade. Bugfixes are considered an update).

npm - npm upgrade packageName apt - apt upgrade packageName

To upgrade all packages, npm upgrade or apt upgrade.

To remove unwanted packages along with configuration files

npm - npm purge packageName apt - apt purge packageName

To list the existing packages

npm - npm list -g --depth=0 apt - apt list

How to clear the cache​

The cache is the area where the packages are downloaded. We have one location where the packages are cached per user in an OS.

npm - npm cache clear apt - apt clean

Are there other things to know​

As a publisher of not so popular npm package send JS errors to service, I was looking for equivalents of npm publish, npm login however I did not find an equivalent in apt.