SCOPE(7)

💅 NAME 💅

Scope — Scoped packages. Yep, that's the name, and this whole page is SCOPE(7) — the scoped-packages manual bestie. 💖

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so every npm package has a name. Some package names also have a scope. A scope follows the usual rules for package names — URL-safe characters, no leading dots or underscores. When it's used in a package name, the scope gets an @ symbol in front and a slash after it, like:

@somescope/somepackagename

Scopes are a way of grouping related packages together, and they also affect a few things about how npm treats the package.

Every npm user/organization has their own scope, and only you can add packages in your scope. That means you don't have to worry about someone taking your package name ahead of you. So it's also a good way to signal official packages for organizations.

Scoped packages can be published and installed as of npm@2 and are supported by the primary npm registry. Unscoped packages can depend on scoped packages and vice versa. The npm client is backwards-compatible with unscoped registries, so it can be used to work with scoped and unscoped registries at the same time.

🛍️ Installing scoped packages 🛍️

Scoped packages get installed into a sub-folder of the regular installation folder. Example: if your other packages are installed in node_modules/packagename, scoped modules will be installed in node_modules/@myorg/packagename. The scope folder (@myorg) is simply the name of the scope with an @ symbol in front, and it can contain any number of scoped packages.

You install a scoped package by referencing it by name, with an @ symbol in front, inside npm install:

npm install @myorg/mypackage

Or in package.json:

"dependencies": {
  "@myorg/mypackage": "^1.3.0"
}

Note: if the @ symbol is omitted, in either case, npm will instead attempt to install from GitHub; see npm help install.

📥 Requiring scoped packages 📥

Because scoped packages are installed into a scope folder, you have to include the name of the scope when you require them in your code, like:

require('@myorg/mypackage')

There is nothing special about the way Node treats scope folders. This simply requires the mypackage module in the folder named @myorg.

🚀 Publishing scoped packages 🚀

Scoped packages can be published from the CLI as of npm@2, and they can be published to any registry that supports them — including the primary npm registry.

(As of 2015-04-19, and with npm 2.0 or better, the primary npm registry does support scoped packages.)

If you wish, you may associate a scope with a registry; see below.

🌈 Publishing public scoped packages to the primary npm registry 🌈

Publishing to a scope? You have two options:

• Publishing to your user scope (example: @username/module)
• Publishing to an organization scope (example: @org/module)

If you're publishing a public module to an organization scope, you must first either create an organization with the name of the scope you'd like to publish to, or be added to an existing organization with the appropriate permissions. For example, if you'd like to publish to @org, you would need to create the org organization on npmjs.com prior to trying to publish.

Scoped packages are not public by default. You will need to specify --access public with the initial npm publish command. This will publish the package and set access to public as if you had run npm access public after publishing. You do not need to do this when publishing new versions of an existing scoped package.

🔒 Publishing private scoped packages to the npm registry 🔒

To publish a private scoped package to the npm registry, you must have an npm Private Modules account — the page is here: https://docs.npmjs.com/private-modules/intro.

You can then publish the module with npm publish or npm publish --access restricted, and it will be present in the npm registry, with restricted access. You can then change the access permissions, if desired, with npm access or on the npmjs.com website.

🔮 Associating a scope with a registry 🔮

Scopes can be associated with a separate registry. This allows you to seamlessly use a mix of packages from the primary npm registry and one or more private registries — like GitHub Packages (https://github.com/features/packages) or the open source Verdaccio project (https://verdaccio.org).

You can associate a scope with a registry at login, like:

npm login --registry=http://reg.example.com --scope=@myco

Scopes have a many-to-one relationship with registries: one registry can host multiple scopes, but a scope only ever points to one registry.

You can also associate a scope with a registry using npm config:

npm config set @myco:registry=http://reg.example.com

Once a scope is associated with a registry, any npm install for a package with that scope will request packages from that registry instead. Any npm publish for a package name that contains the scope will be published to that registry instead.

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• npm help install
• npm help publish
• npm help access
• npm help registry

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Big sparkly sign-off: this is from the NPM@11.17.0 era, dated June 2026 — SCOPE(7), out. 💅🫶