The official npm site gets a code explorer

#​466 — December 8, 2022

Read on the Web

New npm Features for Secure Publishing and Safe Consumption — GitHub continues its work in making the npm ecosystem more secure. Two new things this time: granular access tokens to help package owners control access to publishing workflows, and a new code explorer to look directly at the contents of packages from the official npm site.

Monish Mohan (GitHub)

💡 I think the code explorer will be pretty handy, if only to take a quick look inside weirdly named junk packages to see what’s going on! 😆

AppSignal for Node.js 3.0 Introduces OpenTelemetry Support — AppSignal now supports OpenTelemetry, the open-source standard for telemetry data collection. We’ve also added support for 6 new integrations in this release.

AppSignal sponsor

Is Prisma Better Than Your ‘Traditional’ ORM? — Prisma has become a very popular Node project in recent years and boasts being a ‘next generation’ ORM. The creator of the Practica Node starter app considers here if Prisma makes sense as a universal ‘go to’ ORM to use for most projects.. in short, no, but it’s a solid choice depending on the use case.

Yoni Goldberg

✍️ It must be the week to think about Prisma, because Jack Pordi has also written up his notes on using Prisma in production. He takes a balanced view seeing it as a solution with both pros and cons.

▶  How to Setup Node.js with TypeScript in 2023 — A handy, well produced primer on the bare basics of getting up and running with TypeScript and Node in just four minutes.

Beyond Fireship

▶  Build an AI Image Generator with OpenAI and Node.js — OpenAI’s DALLE 2 AI image generator is available to use over an API, so it can be integrated into a Node app, as shown here. (35 minutes.)

Traversy Media

40+ Node.js Integration Test Best Practices — Component/integration tests are an increasingly popular testing technique for backends. This repository digs into a variety of quick-fire patterns and practices for creating good component tests. There’s also a demo app and examples using Jest, Mocha, Express, Fastify and Nest.js.

Yoni Goldberg, Michael Solomon, and Daniel Gluskin

: Multi-Threading Solution for Your Node.js Application

Snyk sponsor

When to Use gRPC vs GraphQL — A fair comparison of two popular API protocols to see where each works best.

Loren Sands-Ramshaw

🛠 Code & Tools

node-calls-python: Call Python From Node (Without Spawning Processes) — One use case the author mentions is plugging into Python’s rich ecosystem of machine learning tools.

Menyhért Hegedűs

Pechkin: A New File Upload Handling Library — New is great, but the main draw here is speed, asynchronicity, and the fact no temporary files are created. It’s built on top of busboy and can replace something like Multer.

Rafael Sofi-zada

The Developer’s Guide To Building Notification Systems — So your CTO has just handed you a project to revamp your product’s notification system. What are the best practices?

Courier.com sponsor

pdfreader 3.0: Read Text and Tables from PDF Files — Parse out text and tables from PDF files. Supports tabular data with automatic column detection and rule-based parsing.

Adrien Joly

Snapstub: Copy Remote API Endpoints for Local Use — A tool to take snapshots of a given API endpoint and store the response locally for serving as a mock server for development / testing, etc.

Ruy Adorno

🤖  chatgpt-api: A Node Client for ChatGPT — Given it uses the unofficial API for OpenAI’s new GPT-3 based chat bot service, I’d be surprised if this stays working, but apparently folks are using it for numerous projects already, so.. 🤷‍♂️

Travis Fischer

Odiff: A Fast Pixel-by-Pixel Image Diffing Tool and Library — Claims to provide results in milliseconds. The API, which you can use via CLI or Node, supports PNG, JPG, etc. including cross-file comparisons.

Dmitriy Kovalenko

• Unfurl 6.1
  ↳ Metadata scraper supporting oEmbed, Open Graph, etc.

• better-sqlite3 8.0.1
  ↳ Fast and simple SQLite3 library.

• node-geo-tz 7.0.6
  ↳ Get the timezone based on lat/long coordinates.

• Mercurius 11.4
  ↳ Implement GraphQL servers upon Fastify.

• Light My Request 5.8
  ↳ Fake HTTP injection library.

🔠 Fun Text Effects Corner

gradient-string: Beautiful Color Gradients in Terminal Output — What’s the next step up from colorizing the text output of your Node-powered CLI app? Gradients.

Boris K

cfonts: Striking Text Banners for the Terminal — Staying on the topic of striking text effects for your CLI-based Node apps..

Dominik Wilkowski