nodejs/doc/guides/maintaining-npm.md

Maintaining npm in Node.js

New pull requests should be opened when a "next" version of npm has been released. Once the "next" version has been promoted to "latest" the PR should be updated as necessary.

The specific Node.js release streams the new version will be able to land into are at the discretion of the release and LTS teams.

This process only covers full updates to new versions of npm. Cherry-picked changes can be reviewed and landed via the normal consensus seeking process.

Step 1: Clone npm

$ git clone https://github.com/npm/cli.git npm
$ cd npm

or if you already have npm cloned make sure the repo is up to date

$ git remote update -p
$ git reset --hard origin/latest

Step 2: Build release

$ git checkout vX.Y.Z
$ make
$ make release

Note: please run npm dist-tag ls npm and make sure this is the latest dist-tag. latest on git is usually released as next when it's time to downstream

Step 3: Remove old npm

$ cd /path/to/node
$ git remote update -p
$ git checkout -b npm-x.y.z origin/master
$ cd deps
$ rm -rf npm

Step 4: Extract and commit new npm

$ tar zxf /path/to/npm/release/npm-x.y.z.tgz
$ git add -A npm
$ git commit -m "deps: upgrade npm to x.y.z"
$ cd ..

Step 5: Update licenses

$ ./configure
$ make -j4
$ ./tools/license-builder.sh
# The following commands are only necessary if there are changes
$ git add .
$ git commit -m "doc: update npm LICENSE using license-builder.sh"

Note: please ensure you are only making the updates that are changed by npm.

Step 6: Apply Whitespace fix

$ git rebase --whitespace=fix master

Step 7: Test the build

$ make test-npm