Simon Willison’s Weblog

16th March 2024 - Link Blog

npm install everything, and the complete and utter chaos that follows (via) Here’s an experiment which went really badly wrong: a team of mostly-students decided to see if it was possible to install every package from npm (all 2.5 million of them) on the same machine. As part of that experiment they created and published their own npm package that depended on every other package in the registry.

Unfortunately, in response to the leftpad incident a few years ago npm had introduced a policy that a package cannot be removed from the registry if there exists at least one other package that lists it as a dependency. The new “everything” package inadvertently prevented all 2.5m packages—including many that had no other dependencies—from ever being removed!