TLDR: What Is Npx? How Does It Differ From Npm?

If you’re currently or aspiring to be a node.js developer, knowing the difference between npx and npm is essential.

If you’re currently or aspiring to be a node.js developer, knowing the difference between npx and npm is essential.

If you’re reading this article you’re probably already familiar already with what npm is. For those that are not, npm is simply a package manager — a CLI tool that allows us to install and use various packages of code from the Node library. Npm can do much more than this but, for simplicity's sake, we can just think of it as allowing us to download and run packages locally within our projects.

Npx is very similar to npm, but differs in a fundamental way -

Npm is a tool used to install Node packages.

Npx is a tool used to execute Node packages.

It really is as simple as that. Npm is used to locally download packages, which can execute (again locally) when we desire. Npx is used to execute packages without having to install and run them locally. Npx is extremely useful for reducing package pollution — we don’t want to locally install packages that we may only need to execute once.

A practical example of this in the Node package create-react-app , which if you develop with React you will be gruelingly familiar with. This package is used to set up a new React project, so it typically executed only once right at the start of a project. Therefore we don’t want to install it globally as we are not going to use it more than once! (Facebook themselves say to use npx over npm for create-react-app )

With npm:

npm install create-react-app //installs globally, not needed!

create-react-app newApp //executing the package

With npx:

npx create-react-app newApp //executing the package, no install

We are still able to pass command-line arguments to the package when using npx, it functions exactly like executing from the CLI locally.

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