NPX

In a nutshell, npx lets you use npm packages without first installing them either globally or in a local project. I thought it was magic the first time I used it a few weeks back when I began playing with Eleventy. To use Eleventy, I just had to run Eleventy:

$ npx @11ty/eleventy

No node_modules folder, no package.json. Eleventy just ran, generated the static content I wanted, and left no local footprint in my project. Simple does it.

All was right with the world until today, when I discovered Eleventy released 2.0.0 and assumed that running npx @11ty/eleventy would just pull down the latest version. It didn't:

$ npx @11ty/eleventy
...
[11ty] Wrote 10 files in 0.02 seconds (2.0ms each, v1.0.2)

As it turns out, three weeks is forever in developer time. When first running npx @11ty/eleventy I conveniently forgot that it did indeed install Eleventy. I just didn't know where.

$ npm list -g

Nada. And as already mentioned, there was no local installation. After googling, I learned that npx installs in its own cache, which you can find as follows:

$ npm config get cache

There will be a _npx folder in there, which is the npx cache. Just remove the folder to clear the cache (fair warning, this does remove all npx cached packages).

$ cd ~/.npm/
$ rm -rf _npx

Now, when trying to run Eleventy, I see the following:

$ npx @11ty/eleventy

Need to install the following packages:
  @11ty/eleventy@2.0.0
[Ok to proceed? (y)

And all is right with the world again.