npm-search(1) npm-search(1)
NAME
npm-search - Search for packages
Synopsis
npm search <search term> [<search term> ...]
aliases: find, s, se
Note: This command is unaware of workspaces.
Description
Search the registry for packages matching the search terms. npm search
performs a linear, incremental, lexically-ordered search through
package metadata for all files in the registry. If your terminal has
color support, it will further highlight the matches in the results.
This can be disabled with the config item color
Additionally, using the --searchopts and --searchexclude options paired
with more search terms will include and exclude further patterns. The
main difference between --searchopts and the standard search terms is
that the former does not highlight results in the output and you can
use them more fine-grained filtering. Additionally, you can add both of
these to your config to change default search filtering behavior.
Search also allows targeting of maintainers in search results, by
prefixing their npm username with =.
If a term starts with /, then it's interpreted as a regular expression
and supports standard JavaScript RegExp syntax. In this case search
will ignore a trailing / . (Note you must escape or quote many regular
expression characters in most shells.)
Configuration
json
o Default: false
o Type: Boolean
Whether or not to output JSON data, rather than the normal output.
o In npm pkg set it enables parsing set values with JSON.parse()
before saving them to your package.json.
Not supported by all npm commands.
color
o Default: true unless the NO_COLOR environ is set to something other
than '0'
o Type: "always" or Boolean
If false, never shows colors. If "always" then always shows colors. If
true, then only prints color codes for tty file descriptors.
parseable
o Default: false
o Type: Boolean
Output parseable results from commands that write to standard output.
For npm search, this will be tab-separated table format.
description
o Default: true
o Type: Boolean
Show the description in npm search
searchlimit
o Default: 20
o Type: Number
Number of items to limit search results to. Will not apply at all to
legacy searches.
searchopts
o Default: ""
o Type: String
Space-separated options that are always passed to search.
searchexclude
o Default: ""
o Type: String
Space-separated options that limit the results from search.
registry
o Default: "https://registry.npmjs.org/"
o Type: URL
The base URL of the npm registry.
prefer-online
o Default: false
o Type: Boolean
If true, staleness checks for cached data will be forced, making the
CLI look for updates immediately even for fresh package data.
prefer-offline
o Default: false
o Type: Boolean
If true, staleness checks for cached data will be bypassed, but missing
data will be requested from the server. To force full offline mode, use
--offline.
offline
o Default: false
o Type: Boolean
Force offline mode: no network requests will be done during install. To
allow the CLI to fill in missing cache data, see --prefer-offline.
See Also
o npm help registry
o npm help config
o npm help npmrc
o npm help view
o npm help cache
o https://npm.im/npm-registry-fetch
NPM@11.12.1 March 2026 npm-search(1)
npm 11.12.1 - Generated Fri Apr 3 15:25:39 CDT 2026