$ man packages
Engineering · Development Tools
Packages
Reusable modules of code that other projects can import.
why it matters
You don't build everything from scratch. Next.js is a package. Pillow is a package. npm install pulls packages from the internet. They're pre-built solutions to common problems.
how you use it
package.json lists your dependencies. npm install downloads them. Packages live in node_modules/. You import them into your code. They update when you run npm update.
related terms