Being able to list the packages used by a project is quite helpful as it allows developers to better understand how packages are built in general, control the size of their applications, fix package-related bugs or conflicts by downgrading or bumping package versions, replace unmaintained packages, and so on.

Listing installed packages

Listing locally installed packages

To output the list of top-level packages installed in the node_modules directory of a project, you can navigate to the project, and run the npm ls command:

$ npm ls

Example

For example, this command will show the top-level packages of the website project:

$ npm lswebsite@1.0.0 /Users/rludosanu/Projects/website├── axios@1.4.0└── dayjs@1.11.9

Listing globally installed packages

To output the list of top-level packages installed globally on the system, you can use the npm ls with the -g flag:

$ npm ls -g

Example

For example, this command will show the globally installed top-level packages: