Backpat

Backpat is a simple tool for use in automating the production of tech stack notes in projects. Think along the lines of About pages with links for crediting community contributions to your codebase. (Looking at you, student developers.)

Install it as such:

$ npm install --save backpat

Require it like so:

const backpat = require('backpat').backpat;

As of v0.6.0: Invoke it thusly:

backpat().then('do stuff with it here');

And it will parse your project's package.json, identifying all production and developer dependencies and fetching the particulars of each. What you'll get back is a promise that will eventually resolve into an object like this:

{ eslint:
   { version: '3.8.1',
     name: 'eslint',
     url: 'https://github.com/eslint/eslint.git',
     description: 'An AST-based pattern checker for JavaScript.',
     downloads: 4038383 },
  mocha:
   { version: '3.1.2',
     name: 'mocha',
     url: 'https://github.com/mochajs/mocha.git',
     description: 'simple, flexible, fun test framework',
     downloads: 4001598 }}

Simple as that. The npm download count attribute makes ranking and filtering the results a snap.

That's it. Feel free to submit an issue or PR.