npm is a powerful tool, and almost a necessity for Front-End development. You can use npm as your JavaScript package manager tool—including npm and npm packages—while developing portlets in your normal, everyday workflow.
Deployed portlets leverage Liferay AMD Loader to share JavaScript modules and take advantage of semantic versioning when resolving modules among portlets on the same page. The liferay-npm-bundler helps prepare your npm modules for the Liferay AMD Loader.
The bundler copies the project and node_modules’ JS files to the output and
wraps them inside a Liferay.Loader.define() call so that the Liferay AMD
Loader knows how to handle them. It also namespaces the module names in
require() calls and inside the Liferay.Loader.define() call with the
project’s name prefix to achieve dependency isolation.
The bundler injects the dependencies in the package.json pertaining to
the module to make them available at runtime.
This section covers how to set up npm-based portlet projects.