How to tell if npm package was installed globally or locally

Question

I am installing grunt, node, npm, bower, and grunt-cli on windows7.

The instructions say i should run the install commands with -g flag for global.

How can I check if I used the -g flag when i installed. It will take a lot of time to uninstall them and reinstall.

Answer 1

Use the list command with the -g flag to see all packages that are installed globally:

npm list -g

To check if a specific package is installed globally, you can provide the name of package (grunt in this case) as seen below:

npm list -g grunt

Or you can use grep to filter on package names:

npm list -g | grep grunt

Answer 2

To check if a specific package is installed globally execute:

npm list -g [package-name]

Let's take "grunt" as an example. If it is installed globally, you should see something like this

C:\data\tryout\test1>npm list -g grunt
C:\Users\xxxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\npm
└── grunt@0.4.5

If it is not installed globally, you should see something like this

C:\data\tryout\test1>npm list -g grunt
C:\Users\xxxxxxx\AppData\Roaming\npm
└── (empty)

To check if a specific package is installed locally you can execute the same commands as above but without the -g parameter.

Answer 3

npm list --depth 1 --global packagename > /dev/null 2>&1

You can then check the exit status to see if it's installed or not. Thanks Adam Monsen.