GitHub has announced plans to acquire npm. Npm is the company behind the Node package manager for the programming language JavaScript, the npm Registry and npm CLI.
“npm is a critical part of the JavaScript world. The work of the npm team over the last 10 years, and the contributions of hundreds of thousands of open source developers and maintainers, have made npm home to over 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month. Together, they’ve helped JavaScript become the largest developer ecosystem in the world. We at GitHub are honored 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,” Nat Friedman, CEO of GitHub, wrote in a post.
According to Friedman, once the acquisition is completed GitHub will focus on investing in the registry infrastructure and platform, improving the code experience, and engaging with the JavaScript community on the future of npm.
Additionally, GitHub will integrate with npm to help improve the security of the open source supply change and enable users to track changes from GitHub pull requests to the npm package version.
Paying customers using npm Pro, Teams and Enterprise will continue to be supported. The team plans to help customers move private npm packages to GitHub packages later in the year.
“As GitHub has branched out into other aspects of the end-to-end developer community experience, it’s natural to see how the JavaScript package management process fits into that story. It’s not a loss leader or an experimental add-on or a way to quickly hire a team. Rather, the npm registry is a significant and concrete strategic asset serving GitHub’s mission of eliminating transaction costs in software development,” npm’s founder Isaac Schlueter wrote in a post.
