How to automatically build the package.json file for Node.js projects?

In this article, we will be discussing how to build a package.json file for Node.js Projects. At first, we need to use a code editor for our node.js project. There are various code editors available such as sublime text, Visual Studio, etc. We can use any one of them for our project. 

What is a package.json file?

A package.json file is a JSON file that contains information about all the dependencies that are required in the project. Along with that, it also contains basic information about the project. In order to sum up, it contains the metadata of the whole project. It is very important that each of the NodeJS projects must contain a package.json file in order to keep track of the dependencies being installed and removed along with other data. 

Now we will be building our package.json file in a NodeJS application. For the article, we will be using Visual Studio as our code editor, as it contains an in-build terminal. We can also use sublime text but in that case, we need to use Windows Powershell in order to create our package.json file.

At first, we will learn how to manually build your package.json file in NodeJS. Now as soon as we open a folder in our Visual Studio Code editor, open the terminal when we type the following code:

npm init

After pressing enter, a series of questions will be asked us regarding the project folder. In those places, we need to put all the necessary information for creating proper metadata. If we don't want to change a default data or type any new data, we may press ENTER that case. Below is an example of the implementation of the above method.

As a result, a package.json file will be created that can be opened from the file structure, opening the file will look like this:

{
  "name": "geeksforgeeks",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "Building package.JSON",
  "main": "app.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "author": "Sohom Das",
  "license": "ISC"
}

Method 2:

Instead of manually putting all the data in the terminal, we can direct insert all the data with the default value using a single line of code:

npm init -y

Pressing enter will directly create a package.json file with all the default values. 

Package.json file will be created and now everything will be set with default metadata.

{
  "name": "geeksforgeeks",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "",
  "main": "index.js",
  "scripts": {
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  "keywords": [],
  "author": "",
  "license": "ISC"
}