Standard Method (no library)
The arguments are stored in process.argv
Here are the node docs on handling command line args:
process.argv
is an array containing the command line arguments. The first element will be 'node', the second element will be the name of the JavaScript file. The next elements will be any additional command line arguments.
// print process.argv
process.argv.forEach(function (val, index, array) {
console.log(index + ': ' + val);
});
This will generate:
$ node process-2.js one two=three four
0: node
1: /Users/mjr/work/node/process-2.js
2: one
3: two=three
4: four
You did a great job of summarizing what's awesome about Node.js. My feeling is that Node.js is especially suited for applications where you'd like to maintain a persistent connection from the browser back to the server. Using a technique known as "long-polling", you can write an application that sends updates to the user in real time. Doing long polling on many of the web's giants, like Ruby on Rails or Django, would create immense load on the server, because each active client eats up one server process. This situation amounts to a tarpit attack. When you use something like Node.js, the server has no need of maintaining separate threads for each open connection.
This means you can create a browser-based chat application in Node.js that takes almost no system resources to serve a great many clients. Any time you want to do this sort of long-polling, Node.js is a great option.
It's worth mentioning that Ruby and Python both have tools to do this sort of thing (eventmachine and twisted, respectively), but that Node.js does it exceptionally well, and from the ground up. JavaScript is exceptionally well situated to a callback-based concurrency model, and it excels here. Also, being able to serialize and deserialize with JSON native to both the client and the server is pretty nifty.
I look forward to reading other answers here, this is a fantastic question.
It's worth pointing out that Node.js is also great for situations in which you'll be reusing a lot of code across the client/server gap. The Meteor framework makes this really easy, and a lot of folks are suggesting this might be the future of web development. I can say from experience that it's a whole lot of fun to write code in Meteor, and a big part of this is spending less time thinking about how you're going to restructure your data, so the code that runs in the browser can easily manipulate it and pass it back.
Here's an article on Pyramid and long-polling, which turns out to be very easy to set up with a little help from gevent: TicTacToe and Long Polling with Pyramid.
Best Answer
The command is simply
npm uninstall <name>
The Node.js documents https://npmjs.org/doc/ have all the commands that you need to know with npm.
A local install will be in the
node_modules/
directory of your application. This won't affect the application if a module remains there with no references to it.If you're removing a global package, however, any applications referencing it will crash.
Here are different options:
npm uninstall <name>
removes the module fromnode_modules
but does not updatepackage.json
npm uninstall <name> --save
also removes it fromdependencies
inpackage.json
npm uninstall <name> --save-dev
also removes it fromdevDependencies
inpackage.json
npm uninstall -g <name> --save
also removes it globally