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Comment by Achshar | Hacker News Reader

So happy with the --save by default. Someone at work kept installing new dependencies without save (they didn't knew about it, somehow). We then had an unusable package.json. I had to manually find directories in node_modules and install them on production -_-.

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You should implement basic ci with travis et al. That commit should never be able to make it into master. If you are using Github you can force green tests before a pull request is mergeable.

Even if you don't have good test coverage, even having your CI just do a webpack build would likely catch that problem. Well worth it.

Considering it’s free it’s a non-brainer.

And I think this is a complete bs. I have to try the module and then make a conscious decision to use (save) it, not kind of save it first and then hope that it actually does what I want.

Like wtf, who thought that saving something you download maybe for the first time as a dependency is a good idea?

It is perfectly reasonable and avoids mistakes. It's better to have a module that's unused than to break your whole build.

If you want to try something install it and then remove it. That's the more conscious decision. I don't want to have to remember to save the module if I end up liking it, but I will remember to remove it when tearing it down from the codebase, and if I don't, nothing bad happens.

Is it that hard to `npm uninstall` if you decide you don't want it?

Most of the time when I do npm install it's for stuff I know I will need. If you want to check something out you can always just --no-save it.

Does uninstall default to --save too? Because if so, then your workflow doesn't even have to change gear. You just install it to check it out, you like it then do nothing, you don't like it then you can just `npm uninstall`, something you'd hopefully do anyway.

First time I hear about '--save' for uninstall, but it doesn't make a difference in my case because I always install many things, test them all at once, then '--save' what I need and 'rm -rf' the 'node_modules'. After that, 'npm i' gives me everything I need.

I still think this change is beyond stupid.

When you commit your changes, it's similarly easy to inspect package.json changes, and only commit the lines you want [1].

This change increases the chance that what you have working locally is reproducible from "source". IMHO that's a very important goal, while debate over convenience of omitting --save vs --no-save is superficial. Obviously there are 2 groups and one will be unhappy either way, but does that justify calling it "beyond stupid"? (I could maybe see that if you had actual data that 90% people want --no-save...)

Also, seems you can config old default by `npm config set save false` (with the risk one day you'll work on another machine and be surprised by uncustomized defaults). https://twitter.com/maybekatz/status/859193277894991872

Docs are lacking, following up on https://github.com/npm/npm/issues/5108

[1] If your commit flow doesn't make this a pleasant experience — e.g. command-line git IMHO doesn't — you deserve better tools. I can recommend `git citool` for start — old and ugly UI, but fast, portable, has keyboard shortcuts, also very convenient for amending.

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