Is npm init needed?

Question

I always thought that you should initialize npm first before installing any packages

npm init --yes

However I found out that I could just go straight to installing packages

npm i example-package

Then the package would be installed and package.json would be created at the same time.

Is there any reason I should be doing npm init first? Is it only required if I want to specify project details?

Answer 1

It is not required. You can install packages without, and everything will work.

npm init can do basically two things:

• ask for basic project info to include in packages.json
• create a specific type of project (for example React) by using npm init typeofproject

If you just want to use packages and don’t care about naming the project or using a template, just install packages.