Is name actually optional?

[Ethan-Arrowood]

As mentioned here, there is reason to believe that the name property is not actually optional in practice.

More research should be done regarding npm cli's usage of the property in various commands. If the lack of the name property causes anything but publishing to fail we must document that behavior.

[ljharb]

In particular, I suspect workspaces, npm link, npm ls, npm explain, are worth looking into.

[rotu]

FYI, I have seen version omitted when a package.json exists only to influence node behavior via "type": "module" / "commonjs".

Node's docs seem to suggest this usage is kosher:
https://nodejs.org/api/packages.html#writing-dual-packages-while-avoiding-or-minimizing-hazards

If you have a dist/esm and dist/cjs folder and you want to keep the .js suffix, there doesn't seem to be a good way around it.

[ljharb]

At a project root, name and version are required; since all commands are meant to run in a project root, this works out fine. Indeed nested package.json files with only “type” or “main” are fine and expected.

[mcollina]

name is mostly required, but I use package.json without it very often. It'd be odd to add names in those cases.

[wesleytodd]

I think for the sake of these docs we should elaborate on when it is required and when it is not. The goal is to educate and document, not to propose making it required when it is not actually required in all situations.

[Ethan-Arrowood]

Agreed - keep in mind that this documentation is not a specification. It may eventually lead to one someday, but for now we are solely focussed on documenting how things currently work across (the ever growing) JavaScript ecosystem.

[rotu]

Yeah, I think any sort of description of package.json has to be with respect to a tool. So the question “is name actually optional?” is underspecified.

For instance, name is required by npm but not required by node. Other tools (pnpm, yarn, deno, bun, esbuild, SchemaStore…) have diverging expectations.

[wesleytodd]

Ideally we could make a compelling case for all of those projects to come together here to build our the right links or docs for folks doing cross ecosystem work.