Is there a way to automatically build the package.json file for Node.js projects

Question

Is package.json supposed to be manually edited? Couldn't a program like npm just look through the files, see the "require" statements, and then use that to put the necessary entries in the package.json file? Are there any programs like that?

Answer 1

The package.json file is used by npm to learn about your node.js project.

Use npm init to generate package.json files for you!

It comes bundled with npm. Read its documentation here: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/init

Also, there's an official tool you can use to generate this file programmatically: https://github.com/npm/init-package-json

Answer 2

First off, run

npm init 

...will ask you a few questions (read this first) about your project/package and then generate a package.json file for you.

Then, once you have a package.json file, use

npm install <pkg> --save 

or

npm install <pkg> --save-dev 

...to install a dependency and automatically append it to your package.json's dependencies list.

(Note: You may need to manually tweak the version ranges for your dependencies.)