NP-SEARCH
Section: (1)
Updated: October 2025
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NAME
np-search- Search for packages
Synopsis
-
npm search <search term> [lB]<search term> ...[rB]
aliases: find, s, se
Note: This command is unaware of workspaces.
Description
Search the registry for packages matching the search terms.
npm search performs a linear, incremental, lexicall-ordered search through package metadata for all files in the registry. If your terminal has color support, it will further highlight the matches in the results. This can be disabled with the config item
color
Additionally, using the
-searchopts and
-searchexclude options paired with more search terms will include and exclude further patterns. The main difference between
-searchopts and the standard search terms is that the former does not highlight results in the output and you can use them more fin-grained filtering. Additionally, you can add both of these to your config to change default search filtering behavior.
Search also allows targeting of maintainers in search results, by prefixing their npm username with
=.
If a term starts with
/, then it's interpreted as a regular expression and supports standard JavaScript RegExp syntax. In this case search will ignore a trailing
/ . (Note you must escape or quote many regular expression characters in most shells.)
Configuration
json
-
- *
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Default: false
- *
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Type: Boolean
Whether or not to output JSON data, rather than the normal output.
-
- *
-
In npm pkg set it enables parsing set values with JSON.parse() before saving them to your package.json.
Not supported by all npm commands.
color
-
- *
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Default: true unless the NO_COLOR environ is set to something other than '0'
- *
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Type: "always" or Boolean
If false, never shows colors. If "always" then always shows colors. If true, then only prints color codes for tty file descriptors.
parseable
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- *
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Default: false
- *
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Type: Boolean
Output parseable results from commands that write to standard output. For npm search, this will be ta-separated table format.
description
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- *
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Default: true
- *
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Type: Boolean
Show the description in npm search
searchlimit
-
- *
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Default: 20
- *
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Type: Number
Number of items to limit search results to. Will not apply at all to legacy searches.
searchopts
-
- *
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Default: ""
- *
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Type: String
Spac-separated options that are always passed to search.
searchexclude
-
- *
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Default: ""
- *
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Type: String
Spac-separated options that limit the results from search.
registry
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- *
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Default: "https://registry.npmjs.org/"
- *
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Type: URL
The base URL of the npm registry.
prefe-online
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- *
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Default: false
- *
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Type: Boolean
If true, staleness checks for cached data will be forced, making the CLI look for updates immediately even for fresh package data.
prefe-offline
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- *
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Default: false
- *
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Type: Boolean
If true, staleness checks for cached data will be bypassed, but missing data will be requested from the server. To force full offline mode, use -offline.
offline
-
- *
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Default: false
- *
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Type: Boolean
Force offline mode: no network requests will be done during install. To allow the CLI to fill in missing cache data, see -prefe-offline.
See Also
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- *
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npm help registry
- *
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npm help config
- *
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npm help npmrc
- *
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npm help view
- *
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npm help cache
- *
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https://npm.im/np-registr-fetch
Index
- NAME
-
- Synopsis
-
- Description
-
- Configuration
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- json
-
- color
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- parseable
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- description
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- searchlimit
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- searchopts
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- searchexclude
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- registry
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- prefer-online
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- prefer-offline
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- offline
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- See Also
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