Extract version from package.json (NPM) using bash / shell

get-npm-package-version

# Version key/value should be on his own line
PACKAGE_VERSION=$(cat package.json \
  | grep version \
  | head -1 \
  | awk -F: '{ print $2 }' \
  | sed 's/[",]//g')

echo $PACKAGE_VERSION

Thanks for this thread, lots of creative workarounds and useful techniques to be learned here.

However, I think the best option, at least for the OP task, got largely overlooked here. npm show ./ version (as pointed out by @mightyiam among others).

BTW, the actual command AFAICT is npm-view, and there it says that npm has aliased v, show, and info to it.

WARNING: npm show . version and npm show ./ version are different. The . seems to pull from the published repository info (in cache?), where as the ./ actually reads the package.json in the current directory. The latter is the one we want here (at least the OP). So make sure you use npm show ./ version.

FWIW, I have added these two to my ~/.bash_profile:

alias whatver="npm v ./ version"
alias tagver="whatver | xargs git tag && git push --tags"

(I always forget how useful xargs is, until I run across a case like this where it's helpful)

If you already have node installed: node -p "require('./package.json').version"