Local NPM Package

If you find yourself writing an NPM package, but you don't want to release it before you test it, there's a neat way to install a package from your local machine to another project.  You can use npm link instead of npm install.

Go to the directory containing the package you're writing (that you want to test by referencing in another project) and make sure to do an npm init on that directory (this creates the package.json file used by npm).  Once you're done run npm link.  Now go to the project you want to reference the package in and run npm link and pass it the name of the package you used during npm init.

That's it!