Microsoft to acquire JavaScript package vendor npm and integrate its technology with Github

Node.js package manager npm will continue to be supported as part of GitHub, says CEO Nat Friedman

Microsoft is to acquire Node Package Manager (npm) and integrate the technology with GitHub.

The software giant believes integrating npm with GitHub will make the combined community even more appealing to JavaScript developers.

The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The npm repository currently hosts about 1.3 million JavaScript-oriented libraries, which are downloaded nearly 75 billion times a month

"Npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world," GitHub CEO Nat Friedman wrote in a blog post. "We at GitHub are honoured to be part of the next chapter of npm's story and to help npm continue to scale to meet the needs of the fast-growing JavaScript community," he added.

Anticipating developers' concerns about the ownership change, Friedman assured that npm users would not notice any difference following the acquisition and that the public npm registry will always remain free for users.

He also promised to make investments in npm and update its infrastructure to ensure that npm is "fast, reliable, and scalable."

Microsoft also plans to continue supporting npm's paid features for Pro, Teams and Enterprise customers for hosting private registries. Friedman said that later this year, npm customers paying for private package hosting will be able to migrate their code to GitHub Packages.

Npm, the de facto package manager for the JavaScript runtime environment Node.js, was created as an open source project in 2009 to help JavaScript developers to share packaged modules of code.

It consists of two components: a command line client (called npm) and the npm Registry.

The command line client allows developers to install and publish packages. The npm Registry is an online database of packages of open-source code for Node.js, mobile apps, front-end web apps, routers, robots, and many other needs of the JavaScript community.

The npm repository currently hosts about 1.3 million JavaScript-oriented libraries, which are downloaded nearly 75 billion times a month.

Npm as a company was founded in 2014. It is based in Oakland, California, and provides online service for distributing packages of open-source software written in JavaScript.

GitHub is an online repository for open-source projects, acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for $7.5 billion.

GitHub provides a Web-based graphical interface as well as several collaboration features, including wikis and basic task management tools for every project.

Last year, GitHub announced that it was acquiring Pull Panda, a start-up behind code review tools for GitHub developers, to "help teams create more efficient and effective code review workflows on GitHub".