npm-name

August 16, 2026 ยท View on GitHub

Check whether a package or organization name is available on npm

Install

npm install npm-name

Usage

import npmName from 'npm-name';

// Check a package name
console.log(await npmName('chalk'));
//=> false

// Check an organization name
console.log(await npmName('@ava'));
//=> false

console.log(await npmName('@abc123'));
//=> true

try {
	await npmName('_ABC');
} catch (error) {
	console.log(error.message);
	// Invalid package name: _ABC
	// - name cannot start with an underscore
	// - name can no longer contain capital letters
}

API

npmName(name, options?)

Check whether a package/organization name is available (not registered) on npm.

An organization name should start with @ and should not be a scoped package.

Returns a Promise<boolean> of whether the given name is available.

name

Type: string

The name to check.

options

Type: object

registryUrl

Default: User's configured npm registry URL.

The registry URL to check name availability against.

Note: You're unlikely to need this option. Most use-cases are best solved by using the default. You should only use this option if you need to check a package name against a specific registry.

npmNameMany(names, options?)

Check whether multiple package/organization names are available (not registered) on npm.

Returns a Promise<Map> of name and status.

import {npmNameMany} from 'npm-name';

const result = await npmNameMany(['chalk', '@sindresorhus/is', 'abc123']);

console.log(result.get('chalk'));
//=> false

console.log(result.get('@sindresorhus/is'));
//=> false

console.log(result.get('abc123'));
//=> true

names

Type: string[]

Multiple names to check.

options

Type: object

Same as npmName().

Known limitations

This package checks the npm registry to see if a name is already taken. It also makes a best-effort attempt to detect names that npm blocks at publish time for differing from an existing package only by punctuation (-, ., _): the registry strips punctuation from both names before comparing them. The detection tries the spellings that share the name's own word boundaries, so ch-alk and lodash-merge are reported as unavailable because chalk and lodash.merge exist, but it does not enumerate every possible spelling: validate-io.string-primitive is reported as available even though the registry blocks it, because validate.io-string-primitive exists with different boundaries.

A name with no punctuation can also conflict with an existing punctuated one, for example lodashmerge against lodash.merge. That direction cannot be enumerated from the client, as there is no way to ask the registry which existing names strip down to a given string.

However, npm also performs additional undocumented similarity checks server-side that may still reject a name at publish time even if this package reports it as available. There is no public API to replicate these checks.