npm's Progress Bar Halves Your Install Speed

It has come to my attention that some of you are just… running npm as-is. Raw. Out of the box. Like buying a car and never adjusting the mirrors. I don't know who needs to hear this, but your package manager can be told to behave like a proper UNIX citizen instead of a hyperactive carnival barker narrating every file it touches.

What do I mean by that? Well, let me show you my ~/.npmrc configuration, the small file that separates civilised developers from the animals:

progress=false
spin=false
loglevel=error
init.author.name=Attila Gyorffy
init.author.email=attila@example.com
init.author.url=https://attilagyorffy.com
//registry.npmjs.org/:_password=thisissecret
//registry.npmjs.org/:username=attilagyorffy
//registry.npmjs.org/:email=attila@example.com
//registry.npmjs.org/:always-auth=true

~/.npmrc is loaded and interpreted every single time you run an npm command. Every. Single. Time. So you might as well make it do something useful instead of just sitting there collecting dust like that gym membership you bought in January.

The progress bar: a masterclass in self-sabotage

The first two parameters, spin and progress, turn off npm's beloved progress bar. "But I like the progress bar!" you say. Yeah, well, I like beer, but I don't drink it while operating heavy machinery. Turning off the progress bar results in installs that are roughly twice as fast. Let that sink in. The tool that is supposed to tell you how long things are taking is literally making things take longer. It's like hiring a bloke to time your 100-metre sprint and he tackles you at the 50.

Don't take my word for it. Go read the famous GitHub issue about it. But first, get yourself some popcorn and a cold drink, because the comment thread is the sort of beautiful disaster you usually have to pay Netflix for.

The Rule of Silence, or: shut up, npm

The loglevel parameter tells npm to be less noisy. If you believe command-line tools should follow the Unix Rule of Silence — when a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing — then this one's for you. Programs should be unobtrusive. They should do their job and keep their mouths shut, like a good butler or a competent plumber.

Now, setting loglevel=error won't stop npm from being a little too chatty. It's still going to mutter things at you like a drunk uncle at Christmas dinner. But it's an improvement. And here's the truly beautiful part: even if you set the log level to silent — the highest possible level of "please, for the love of God, stop talking" — npm will still report some unnecessary information. Because of course it will. It's npm. Asking it to be quiet is like asking a seagull not to steal your chips.

The rest: module author business

The remaining lines in that config are for module authors. The init.author.* fields save you from typing your own name every time you run npm init, which, if you think about it, is absurd that you'd have to do in the first place. "Who are you?" asks the tool. Mate, we've been over this. I'm the same person I was three minutes ago when I ran it for the last package.

The registry authentication lines (_password, username, email, always-auth) handle authenticating with the npm registry. Nothing glamorous, but necessary if you want to publish packages without npm asking you to prove you exist every single time.

Go forth and configure

Look, the above isn't exactly a PhD thesis in systems administration. It's a handful of lines in a dotfile. But it's the difference between a CLI that respects your time and one that's actively wasting it while showing you a pretty animation of itself wasting it.

Also, have a look at the full npm config documentation. There are more knobs to turn than you'd expect, and you might find something else worth tweaking. It's a bit like rummaging through the settings menu on your telly — mostly pointless, but every now and then you find a gem that makes you wonder why it wasn't on by default.

• Turn off progress and spin for dramatically faster installs
• Set loglevel=error to make npm behave like a respectable UNIX tool
• Pre-fill init.author.* so you never have to introduce yourself to your own computer again

Your ~/.npmrc is right there, waiting. It takes thirty seconds to configure and it'll save you from years of watching a progress bar that's actively sabotaging you. If that's not a strong enough sales pitch, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe you enjoy suffering. Maybe you think the progress bar is pretty. Either way, don't come crying to me when your npm install takes twice as long as it should because a little animated bar is chewing through your CPU cycles for absolutely no reason.