10 NPM packages to accelerate your code journey

We are coming back with our series about the best productivity tools for developers! After a selection of our favorite VS Code Extension and the Typescript must have extensions we are turning toward Node JS recommendations. You know the Ponicode philosophy, it’s all about boosting developers' lives and we shortlisted for you 10 npm packages to accelerate your next projects.

Socket.io

Socket is a package enabling you to build real-time communication apps using your data or an API  as a source of real-time streams of content. The range of applications goes from collecting posts live to creating your own chat service. Every real-time communication related project is now accessible to you. Be creative and start building your own Twitter or Facebook bot for example.

We found it a bit complicated to begin with but you can ninja kick the learning curve thanks to the many tutorials available out there. 

Keywords: Node api content stream chat

4 million weekly downloads 

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npm i socket.io

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Cloudinary

Cloudinary simply offers a solution to optimize your software’s entire image management pipeline.

Cloudinary is a cloud service with the full range of image features: upload, resizing, optimizing, cropping. The solution is developer friendly enough that you can get a good grip of the tool very quickly. Don’t wait up to integrate it to your project, the free version will let you see the power of the tool. You can get 1 free Account with 25k transformations or 25 GB of managed storage or 25 GB of net viewing bandwidth.

Keywords:  image, media, node, content, optimizing, minifying, pagespeed app optimization

125k weekly downloads

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npm install cloudinary

Browserify

For all of you out there who know the time lost and struggle into handling multiple JavaScript libraries: a solution is there for you. You no longer have to continuously search which script uses which library. Instead you can use Browserify to create an organized and clean client-side codebase thanks to solid components  that quickly allocate dependencies based on their usage in different situations. Browserify helps you structure and simplify so that your code looks healthy.

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Keywords: clean code, architecture, collaboration, legacy code, dependencies, libraries

1,600,000 weekly downloads

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npm install -g browserify

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Grunt

Another great package to focus on coding and stop handling the tedious side of your project. Grunt enables you to automate a wide range of tasks including code linting or compiling related tasks. They have a range of plugins to explore and you can also create your own plugin if there is a task they haven’t covered yet. 

If you want a hint, here are the top 5 most popular task they support at the moment 

• clean files and folders
• run predefined tasks whenever watch file patterns are added, changed or deleted
• copy files and folders
• minify Javascript files with Uglify JS
• concatenate files

Keywords: automation, task automation, code optimization, developer augmentation

700,000 weekly downloads 

https://gruntjs.com/

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npm install -g grunt-cli

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JSHint

JSHint is a linting tool. It will run through your JavaScript code and find mistakes, regular errors (syntax, implicit type conversion, variable leak…) and consequently help you avoid potential bugs. JSHint is also able to share a few solutions to the mistakes it detects and it will save you hours of debugging.

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Keywords: lint, bug, debugging, syntax error

https://jshint.com/

500,000+ weekly downloads

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npm i jshint

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Husky

Husky is a tool to simplify git hooks implementation. Thanks to Husky you can improve the coding standards across your team by requiring systematic lint and test before allowing to push a PR. 

You can commit to your team that bad formatted code never gets committed ever again  (ah ah). But beyond this you can do a lot more and bind more scripts and command to different hooks.

Keywords: git hooks, commit, PR, test management, version control

5,500 weekly downloads

npm i husky 

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flat

Simply package to flatten or unflatten objects with delimited keys for nested JavaScript objects.

Keywords: flat, Javascript object, nested objects, clean code

5,500,000 weekly downloads

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npm i flat

Dotenv

0 dependency module that loads environment variables from a .env file into process.env.

And their latest releases Dotenv.sync to sync your .env files between machines, environments, and team members. Currently under soft release.

Keywords: env files, zero dependancy

20,000,000 weekly downloads

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npm i dotenv

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Randomcolor

I’ve spent too much time looking for the right colors or automating color generation only to end up with grim scales of grey.  Randomcolor is a script generating attractive random colors. And in order to respect your branding guidelines you can pass an options object to influence the type of color it produces.

Keywords: front end, color generation, script, design

https://randomcolor.lllllllllllllllll.com/

83,000 weekly downloads

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npm i randomcolor

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lodash

​​Lodash is a popular and highly used JavaScript utility library. It delivers modularity, performance, extras and it exposes useful methods on JS arrays, objects and other data structures.

Keywords: JS library, utility library, Lodash

https://lodash.com/

40,500,000 weekly downloads

npm i iodash

That's a wrap on our list of the best npm packages to boost your development experience. Hopefully you found a few new tools to enhance your coding journey 😉

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