GitHub buys NPM, JavaScript Package Manager

Microsoft owned GitHub announced that it is acquiring NPM, the world's largest JavaScript package manager vendor.

Founded in 2014, San Francisco based npm has raised a total of $10.6M in funding over 2 rounds, according to CrunchBase. NPM is very popular among JavaScript community hosting over 1.3 million packages and with 75 billion downloads a month.

Executive Opinion

GitHub CEO, Nat Friedman, said in a blog post, "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. For the millions of developers who use the public npm registry every day, npm will always be available and always be free."

NPM founder and CEO, Isaac Schlueter, in a blog post, said,  "Our commitment to that community is to keep the npm registry free for open source development for the foreseeable future, and continue to improve the npm CLI. At GitHub, npm will have the added support and backing of one of the world’s largest companies, behind the world’s largest community of developers."

GitHub and NPM Integration

GitHub and npm intend to enhance the security of the open-source software supply chain. The integration will further allow developers to trace changes from a GitHub pull request to the npm package version.

GitHub will invest in NPM to keep it fast, reliable, and scalable. npm Pro, Teams, and Enterprise hosting private registries will continue to receive support.

The announcement noted a migration plan for npm’s paying customers to move their private npm packages to GitHub Packages  —allowing npm to exclusively focus on being a great public registry for JavaScript.