I’m following the odin project to learn web development. I had read about malicious packages in npm multiple times, so I avoided it until now. I’m on the webpack lesson now, and to use webpack, I need to install it using npm. I also see that it has many dependencies, and those dependencies will have other depenedencies and so on.
Why is it like this? Is there any other tool like webpack that doesn’t require npm? Or rather, can someone clarify how to properly use npm or link a guide that explains it? I have this kind of fear and reluctance about using npm after all the things I read.
You’re good to keep your skepticism. If you trust them, the ones creating the tutorial to have vetted to a degree, or that a very popular package like that is vetted to a reasonable degree, you’ll just go ahead with it. (Like most people do without questioning it.)
You’ll need considerable experience and insight to do good, reasonable risk assessment. Without that, you can either trust and hope in others, or skip the ecosystem and look for alternative technologies.
It’s also worth noting that your potential impact is considerable lower if you’re only doing local test and development work, not publishing or publicly serving anything. I’m not personally familiar if or to what degree running arbitrary local commands has been limited in the npm ecosystem by now.