Is there a way (some sort of API) in node to programatically call local npm publish, other than thro-CodePudding

I'm trying to get the list of files from a local package that would be published by npm. The best solution I've come by is to use

npm publish --dry-run

through child_processes.spawn(...) or a related method.

However, this is not very reliable as I need to parse the text output that is not guaranteed to be/stay the same in all environments/future releases.

Of course, I could npm pack and list the contents of the tarball, but that is rather outside the scope of my project, as for instance I wouldn't want to rely on being able to write to the filesystem.

So, is there a "semantic" way to access the data returned by npm publish?

CodePudding user response：

To answer my own question:

The specific case I was having trouble with was solved using the json option that I was not aware of at the time I posted the question:
```
npm pack --dry-run --json
```
through child_processes.spawn, which at least produces semantic results.
To the general question, i.e., whether it was possible to call npm functions directly, not through spawning, the answer seems to be NO.

I tried installing npm as a library:
```
npm install npm
```
and then in the javascript source
```
const Pack = require('npm').Pack;
```
resulted in an enlightening

Error: The programmatic API was removed in npm v8.0.0