Question

Is there a way we can display the version of Express, Jade, Stylus.. that we have installed in our nodejs. Capture the current version and display it in the browser.

Thanks

Answer 1

Basically a simple

$ npm ls

does what you want: It gives you a list of all installed modules, their versions, and their dependencies with the same info recursively.

As you have asked for a solution that works in your browser: The easiest solution will probably be to run that command as a child process from Node.js using the child_process module, and pipe the child’s stdout property to the response stream of an http server.

Then you get the output of npm ls inside your browser.

The basic frame looks like this:

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn,
    http = require('http');

http.createServer(function (req, res) {
  var npm = spawn('npm', [ 'ls' ]);
  npm.stdout.pipe(res);
}).listen(3000);

Of course you can make it nicer, more comfortable, and so on 🙂

Update from comments:

var npm = spawn('npm', [ 'ls', '--json' ]);