Dependents tooling

[andrewhughes101]

As a follow on from #307 I've started looking into the best way to get a modules dependents. So far the only way I've found how to do it is to scrape the npm site on this endpoint https://www.npmjs.com/browse/depended/express

Does anyone know of any alternative way or if there is an endpoint on http://registry.npmjs.org/ that would return the dependents?

[vweevers]

For scraping, you might like npm-dependants. There's no official API. The only other option is to replicate the registry (can take a few hours), e.g.:

const registry = require('package-stream')({
  // Update sequence (seq) to start from.
  since: 0
})

registry
  .on('package', (pkg, seq) => {})
  .on('up-to-date', () => {})

I've been thinking it'd be nice to have a service that continuously replicates, puts the packages in a graph database, and exposes an HTTP API (vweevers/about-native-addons#4).

[ghinks]

I was going to raise an issue with a similar request. As I have actually started to look at modules that need to be maintained within the expressJS system I see a need for a tool like this.

I do not believe there is a tool that does this currently. Is this something that @darcyclarke or @ruyadorno could help us with? Even add hoc requests that get solved off line would be valuable.

[andrewhughes101]

For the first draft of the tool I've created this repo https://github.com/andrewhughes101/dependents-testing

[dominykas]

@andrewhughes101 did you want a repo under pkgjs for this? Do we have a name?

[andrewhughes101]

@andrewhughes101 did you want a repo under pkgjs for this? Do we have a name?

yes please, Do you think the name dependents-testing is ok?

[ljharb]

At the moment, it just lists dependents - is it planned to test them too, or is that a separate package? If it's just for listing them, then probably just dependents?

[andrewhughes101]

dependents is good with me, maybe it would be better to split the testing inot a seperate package

[dominykas]

https://github.com/pkgjs/dependents

[andrewhughes101]

As discussed in the last meeting the next steps is to create the basic CLI testing tool that takes in a list of dependents from pkgjs/dependents, detects which branch you are on and opens a PR to change the version field of the package the dependent is depending upon for the current branch.

I think we also need a new repo in pkgjs for this tool, so I will open an issue for the new repo.