npm/cli v12.0.0

on GitHub

12.0.0 (2026-07-08)

⚠️ BREAKING CHANGES

• npm view --json now always returns an array.
• npm sbom --sbom-format=cyclonedx now reports the name field from each package's package.json instead of the on-disk directory name. The name, bom-ref, and purl of the root component and of aliased dependencies may change.
• npm no longer registers man pages with the system when installed globally. man npm-install will no longer work, but npm help install is unaffected.
• The npm pkg output is no longer forced to json. This means you can get single values without having to worry about wrapping of the values. It also outputs non-json content more similarly to npm view.
• npm shrinkwrap is removed, the shrinkwrap config alias is removed, and npm-shrinkwrap.json is no longer loaded or honored at the project root or from inside dependency tarballs. Rename project-root npm-shrinkwrap.json to package-lock.json; use bundleDependencies if you need to ship a locked dependency tree.
• The Twitter and Freenode profile fields have been removed from the npm registry. This means that users will no longer be able to set or view these fields in their npm profiles.
• npm will no longer attempt to resolve the path to node via whichnode. process.execPath is already set by Node to the resolved real path of the node binary, so the lookup was redundant. Scripts that expected npm to override process.execPath with a PATH-resolved (potentially symlinked) node path may be affected.
• the --json output of npm pack and npm publish have changed. They are now always consistent, and in the same format.
• the star, stars and unstar commands have been removed
• The npm adduser command has been removed. Create and manage user accounts on the npm website, and use npm login to authenticate on the command line.
• Preserve https protocol when working with git (#8703)
• The default license for npm init has been changed from "ISC" to an empty string. If not set, the license field will be omitted from new packages.
• npm now supports node ^22.22.2 || ^24.15.0 || >=26.0.0
• allow-git and allow-remote now default to "none"; set them to "all" (or "root") to install git or user-supplied tarball-URL dependencies.
• root `preinstall` now runs before dependencies are installed.
• unknown configs in .npmrc, unknown CLI flags, abbreviated flags, and single-hyphen multi-char shorthands now throw instead of warning.

Chores

• b77b532 #9735 remove pre-release mode from npm 12 and workspaces (#9735) (@reggi, @Copilot)

Dependencies

• workspace: @npmcli/arborist@10.0.0
• workspace: @npmcli/config@11.0.0
• workspace: libnpmaccess@11.0.0
• workspace: libnpmdiff@9.0.0
• workspace: libnpmexec@11.0.0
• workspace: libnpmfund@8.0.0
• workspace: libnpmorg@9.0.0
• workspace: libnpmpack@10.0.0
• workspace: libnpmpublish@12.0.0
• workspace: libnpmsearch@10.0.0
• workspace: libnpmteam@9.0.0
• workspace: libnpmversion@9.0.0