---
title: npm-search
section: 1
description: Search for packages
---

### Synopsis

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### Description

Search the registry for packages matching the search terms. `npm search`
performs a linear, incremental, lexically-ordered search through package
metadata for all files in the registry. If your terminal has color
support, it will further highlight the matches in the results.  This can
be disabled with the config item `color`

Additionally, using the `--searchopts` and `--searchexclude` options
paired with more search terms will include and exclude further patterns.
The main difference between `--searchopts` and the standard search terms
is that the former does not highlight results in the output and you can
use them more fine-grained filtering. Additionally, you can add both of
these to your config to change default search filtering behavior.

Search also allows targeting of maintainers in search results, by prefixing
their npm username with `=`.

If a term starts with `/`, then it's interpreted as a regular expression
and supports standard JavaScript RegExp syntax. In this case search will
ignore a trailing `/` .  (Note you must escape or quote many regular
expression characters in most shells.)

### Configuration

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### See Also

* [npm registry](/using-npm/registry)
* [npm config](/commands/npm-config)
* [npmrc](/configuring-npm/npmrc)
* [npm view](/commands/npm-view)
* [npm cache](/commands/npm-cache)
* https://npm.im/npm-registry-fetch
