Is there a way to force npm to generate package-lock.json?

Question

I deleted it by accident and have made many changes to package.json since. An npm install or npm update do not generate package-lock

Answer 1

package-lock.json is re-generated whenever you run npm i.

Answer 2

When working with local packages, the only way I found to reliably regenerate the package-lock.json file is to delete it, as well as in the linked modules and all corresponding node_modules folders and let it be regenerated with npm i

Answer 3

By default, package-lock.json is updated whenever you run npm install. However, this can be disabled globally by setting package-lock=false in ~/.npmrc.

When the global package-lock=false setting is active, you can still force a project’s package-lock.json file to be updated by running:

npm install --package-lock

This command is the only surefire way of forcing a package-lock.json update.

Answer 4

If your npm version is lower than version 5 then install the higher version for getting the automatic generation of package-lock.json.

Example: Upgrade your current npm to version 6.14.0

npm i -g npm@6.14.0

You could view the latest npm version list by

npm view npm versions

Answer 5

In npm 6.x you can use

npm i --package-lock-only

According to https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/install.html

The --package-lock-only argument will only update the package-lock.json, instead of checking node_modules and downloading dependencies.

Answer 6

This is answered in the comments; package-lock.json is a feature in npm v5 and higher. npm shrinkwrap is how you create a lockfile in all versions of npm.