npm Provider

Uses npm  to manage globally installed Node.js tools. If your team lives on npm (or some tool needs npm specifically), this is the provider you want.

Platforms: macOS, Linux

Usage

# Install globally (and yes, --global matters)
hams npm install --global prettier
 
# Remove
hams npm uninstall --global prettier
 
# See what hams is managing
hams npm list

The --global isn’t added for you. That’s deliberate — it prevents accidentally declaring a project dependency as a global install.

Hamsfile example

# macOS/npm.hams.yaml
schema_version: 1
provider: npm
 
groups:
  - tag: lint
    items:
      - app: prettier
        intro: Opinionated code formatter.
      - app: eslint
        intro: JavaScript and TypeScript linter.
 
  - tag: dev-tools
    items:
      - app: "@anthropic-ai/claude-code"
        intro: Claude Code CLI.
      - app: nodemon
        intro: Auto-restart Node scripts on file change.

Scoped packages (like @anthropic-ai/claude-code) need quotes in YAML. Otherwise the @ trips the parser.

How state is probed

hams runs npm list -g --depth=0 --json and pulls the globals from the JSON. Same shape as the pnpm provider, different tool.

pnpm or npm?

With no strong preference, pnpm is the better default: faster, disk-efficient, and its ecosystem is friendly. Reasons to pick npm anyway:

• You’re using the npm that ships with Node and don’t want a second tool
• A tool’s README only shows npm install -g and you don’t want to think about compatibility
• Team standard is npm, and mixing in pnpm would be noise

The two providers can coexist, but each package should belong to exactly one of them. Otherwise apply will install/remove on both sides — confusing, and it won’t do what you want.