Here are some sweet NPM tricks. They might seem pretty obvious to some people. If you're one of them, check out more NPM tricks at devthought.com.

To quickstart a project and build package.json:

$ npm init

Start node using the package.json "start" file (defaults to $ node server.js)

$ npm start

You can also define scripts in the package file:

"scripts": {
    "test": "mocha mytest.js",
    "build": "uglify mycode.js
}

Then run them like this:

$ npm run-script test
$ npm run-script build
$ npm test # shortcut for `run-script test`

View package details:

$ npm view <packagename> [detail(ie 'version')]

Bump package:

$ npm version 1.2.3

It’ll open up your package.json file, change the version to 1.2.3, git add it, git commit it, and git tag v1.2.3 it.

Rebuild a package:

$ npm rebuild <packagename>

This is useful when you install a new version of node, and must recompile all your C++ addons with the new binary. For example, the hiredis package is compiled from C, and if node is updated it will need to be rebuilt.