Install NPM Dependency From GitHub URL

When working with JavaScript, I often find myself wanting to use changes that I've made for an NPM (NodeJS) dependency in a personal fork.

NPM (and yarn) have a useful convention for pointing to a git repository instead in a project's package.json dependencies by pointing to the fork and optionally using a specific branch instead of giving it a version number.

Here's how to set that up in a package.json for SSH and HTTPS. This example uses the isomorphic-fetch package.

Convention for a basic configuration for a package using git:

git+{protocol}://{user}@{hostname}:{project owner}/{project}.git#{branch name}

• protocol can be ssh or https.
• user and hostname for logging in via git. Usually the user is git, especially for github.com and gitlab.com
• project owner is either an organization or user
• project is the repo
• branch name (optional) is the branch you want to work off of

Install NPM dependency from GitHub via SSH

Following the example, a basic version composition for SSH looks like this:

git+ssh://git@github.com:matthew-andrews/isomorphic-fetch.git

By branch:

git+ssh://git@github.com:matthew-andrews/isomorphic-fetch.git#some-branch

Install NPM dependency from GitHub via HTTPS

Following the example, a basic version composition for HTTPS looks like this:

git+https://git@github.com:matthew-andrews/isomorphic-fetch.git

By branch:

git+https://git@github.com:matthew-andrews/isomorphic-fetch.git#some-branch

Example in the package.json

This is what the JSON would look like for dependencies in package.json:

{
    "dependencies": {
        "isomorphic-fetch": "git@github.com:matthew-andrews/isomorphic-fetch.git"
    }
}