Npm & Npx

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We know npm is a package manager, we caninstall node.js packages using npm. But what is npx?
I guess that everyone is confused when we start to learn React and see this code

npx create-react-app my-app

Let talk about npx and see what is the difference between npm and npx.

What is NPX?

  • NPX is a tool to execute node.js packages. X means Execute.

  • NPX uses the packages directly from npm registry, no global or local installation required.

When to us NPX?

Install packages neither globally nor locally

Sometimes, we don't want to install packages neither globally nor locally, like initiating project. For example, if we want to install create-react-app, we need use npm -g to install it globally. But we only need it when initiating project. It is a waste to install globally.
When we use npx, it downloads create-react-app to a template folder and delete it after install.

Execute commands directly in Terminal like testing

For example, we want to test our code using Mocha, we are going to check the version of our Mocha.

without NPX
./node_modules/.bin/ mocha --version
with NPX

it create a new shell to run the command.

npx mocha  --version

Much better!