Provider

Intro

The Provider is responsible for fetching package information. It's the component the packageanalyzer uses to retrieve the package.json for a particular package, which is essential for building the dependency tree.

There are different kinds of providers for different sources. For example, there is a provider to fetch data from the npm registry, and another one to get data from the local file system.

Core Interfaces

The provider system is built around two main interfaces:

IPackageMetaDataProvider

This interface is responsible for fetching the metadata of a package. The metadata contains information about all the available versions of a package.

export interface IPackageMetaDataProvider {
    getPackageMetadata(name: string): Promise<PackageMetaData | undefined>;
}

IPackageJsonProvider

This interface is responsible for fetching the package.json of a specific version of a package.

export interface IPackageJsonProvider {
    getPackageJson: (...args: PackageVersion) => Promise<IPackageJson>;
}

where PackageVersion is a tuple of [name: string, version?: string].

Most providers implement both of these interfaces.