Useful Npx Packages for the Developer's Everyday Life

Npm comes with a neat tool called npx that lets you directly execute packages from the npm registry. It temporarily downloads it behind the scene and won’t pollute your local or global npm environment.

In this post I’ll skip useful packages that are bound to libraries and frameworks like Angular’s ng, react’s create-react-app or capacitor’s cap.

I focus on packages that have helped me through my daily life as a developer.

Delete node_modules with npkill

usage: npx npkill

repo: npkill

It’s no secret that node_modules folders are the black holes of software development. This package will help you get back your disk space by selecting and deleting the node_modules of your (unused) projects.

Kill any port with kill-port

usage: npx kill-port [port]

repo: npkill

Did some webpack dev server not shut down nicely and now 8080, or any port for that matter, is in use? Just kill it with kill-port.

Serve local http server with http-server

usage: npx http-server [root directory]

repo: http-server

Easily serve a directory as a simple webserver. Especially useful for compiled webapps in /build folders.

Compare timezones with timezone-compare

usage: npx timezone-compare

repo: timezone-compare

This package helped me to plan quickly setting up meetings with others of different timezones.

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Honorable Mention: get emoji recommendation with emoj

usage: npx emoj [word(s) to get recommendation on]

repo: emoj

I used this package to death! Sadly its API, that came from getdango’s Emoji & Deep Learning, is not maintained anymore. Thus the emoji results are not ground breaking anymore.

As a replacement I suggest using ctrl + cmd + space (macOS), that will help you a bit on the way of finding the right emoji.

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1/ Let me list a few useful npm packages that I never install but still use in my daily life as a frontend developer 👇🧵

— Simon Wicki (@zwacky) February 18, 2021