How to list all the commands available in package.json?

Question

A package.json can have lot of commands and common ones are npm start, npm test but there are generally more commands.

Is there a way to list all the commands?

Currently I use less package.json but it has too much noise to show.

Answer 1

You can use:

npm run

to list all commands. (Yarn also features similar functionality on yarn run.)

This behavior is made explicit in the help page of npm help run:

This  runs an arbitrary command from a package's "scripts" object.  If no "command" is provided, it will list the available scripts.

---

To get a quick overview if you have jq installed:

jq .scripts package.json

You can still pipe that subset to less if you need to

jq .scripts package.json | less

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Furthermore, you can use tab completion via npm-completion and then you should see a list of possible commands when hitting tab and completes the commands if there is only one option left.

You can set it up temporarily via

source <(npm completion)

Depending on your terminal, you can make it persistent behavior by adding to your relevant config file:

npm completion >> ~/.bashrc
npm completion >> ~/.zshrc

Answer 2

Here's a minimalist approach using only node!

List only the available commands.

node -e "console.log(Object.keys(require('.' + require('path').sep + 'package.json').scripts || {}))"

List all the available commands and their target.

node -e "console.log(require('.' + require('path').sep + 'package.json').scripts || {})"

Taking it one step further, you can turn this into a run command! In package.json add it to the scripts.

Example:

"scripts": {
   "ls": "node -e \"console.log(require('.' + require('path').sep + 'package.json').scripts || {})\""
}

Now you can npm run ls 🔥!