normalize-package-data

normalize-package data exports a function that normalizes package metadata. This data is typically found in a package.json file, but in principle could come from any source - for example the npm registry.

Installation

npm install normalize-package-data

Usage

Basic usage is really simple. You call the function that normalize-package-data exports. Let's call it normalizeData.

normalizeData = require('normalize-package-data')
packageData = fs.readfileSync("package.json")
normalizeData(packageData)
// packageData is now normalized

Optionally, you may pass a "warning" function. It gets called whenever the normalizeData function encounters something that doesn't look right. It indicates less than perfect input data.

normalizeData = require('normalize-package-data')
packageData = fs.readfileSync("package.json")
warnFn = function(msg) { console.error(msg) }
normalizeData(packageData, warnFn)
// packageData is now normalized. Any number of warnings may have been logged.

If you don't provide a warning function, normalizeData functions silently.

Potential exceptions

If the supplied data has an invalid name or version vield, normalizeData will throw an error. Depending on where you call normalizeData, you may want to catch these errors so can pass them to a callback.

What normalization (currently) entails

• The value of name field gets trimmed
• The value of the version field gets cleaned by semver.clean. See documentation for the semver module.
• If name and/or version fields are missing, they are set to empty strings.
• If repository field is a string, it will become am object with url set to the original string value, and type set to "git".
• If files field is not an array, it will be removed.
• If bin field is a string, then bin field will become an object with name set to the value of the name field, and bin set to the original string value.
• If man field is a string, it will become an array with the original string as its sole member
• If keywords field is string, it is considered to be a list of keywords separated by one or more white-space characters. It gets converted to an array by splitting on \s+.
• If bundledDependencies field (a typo) exists and bundleDependencies field does not, bundledDependencies will get renamed to bundleDependencies.
• All people fields (author, maintainers, contributors) get converted into objects with name, email and url properties.
• If the value of any of the depedencies fields (dependencies, devDependencies, optionalDependencies) are strings, they get converted into objects with familiar name=>value pairs.
• The values in optionalDependencies get added to dependencies. optionalDependencies array is left untouched.
• If description field does not exists, but readme field does, then (more or less) the first paragraph of text that's found in the readme is taken a value for description.
• If bugs field is a string, the value of bugs field is changed into an object with url set to the original string value.
• If bugs field does not exist, but repository field points to a repository hosted on GitHub, the value of the bugs field gets set to an url in the form of https://github.com/[owner-name]/[repo-name]/issues . If the repository field points to a GitHub Gist repo url, the associated http url is chosen.
• If bugs field is an object, the resulting value only has email and url properties. If email and url properties are not strings, they are ignored. If no valid values for either email or url is found, bugs field will be removed.
• If homepage field is not a string, it will be removed.

Rules for name field

If name field is given, the value of the name field must be a string. The string may not:

• start with a period.
• contain the following characters: /@\s+%
• contain and characters that would need to be encoded for use in urls.
• resemble the word node_modules or favicon.ico (case doesn't matter).

Rules for version field

If version field is given, the value of the version field must be a valid semver string, as determined by the semver.valid method. See documentation for the semver module.

Credits

This code is based on read-package-json written by Isaac Schlueter.