Microsoft-Owned GitHub Acquires npm

March 16, GitHub announced that it has agreed to acquire npm, a JavaScript package managing platform. Financial details including the value of acquisition are not disclosed. Npm will continue to be offered for free, and npm integration with Github is a work in progress.

Npm is an open-source project, started in 2009. After that, they raised funds in 2013 and became a privately owned company. Currently, npm is home to 1.3 million packages with 75 billion downloads a month.

After the acquisition, GitHub plans to invest in the registry infrastructure and platform, improve the core experience, and engage with the community. Most notable is the core experience. They have already started working on some features like v7 CLI (command line interface). For example, they are working to improve Workspaces, which manages multiple packages from within a singular top-level root package, and multi-factor authentication. Through these improvements, they will bring better experience for developers and maintainers.

In addition, by integrating npm into GitHub, they can enhance the security of open source software supply chain, and track changes made via GitHub pull requests.

GitHub CEO Nat Friedman promised in his blog, where he announced the acquisition, “For the millions of developers who use the public npm registry every day, npm will always be available and always be free.”

GitHub will continue to support customers who use paid npm Pro, Teams and Enterprise. They are also working on GitHub Packages, a great multi-language packages registry, and later this year, private npm packages can be moved to GitHub Packages. This allows npm to focus solely on public registry.