Learning web development: Native package managers

[2025-09-16] dev, javascript, learning web dev
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This blog post is part of the series “Learning web development” – which teaches people who have never programmed how to create web apps with JavaScript.

To download the projects, go to the GitHub repository learning-web-dev-code and follow the instructions there.

I’m interested in feedback! If there is something you don’t understand, please write a comment at the end of this page.

In this chapter, we install a package manager for our operating system. That enables us to install shell commands that we can’t get via npm.

Why use package managers for operating systems?  

So far, we have used npm for installing shell commands. However, its range is mostly limited to code written in JavaScript. Some important shell commands are written in other programming languages. For those, we need an operating system package manager. Popular ones include:

  • Windows: WinGet
  • MacOS: Homebrew
  • Linux has a variety of package managers. You need to find out which one works best with your distribution.

We’ll use the term native for binary code that can be run directly on an operating system. JavaScript shell commands are not native: We need a JavaScript engine to run them.

An important native shell command: curl  

When working with HTTP(S), there is one very useful native shell command: curl. It may already be installed on your operating system. You can check like this:

curl -h

If you don’t get an error message then curl is already installed.

Installing curl via a native package manager  

This is how you can install curl:

Using curl  

Let’s quickly try out curl. The simplest way is to use it as follows: It downloads a resource from the web and prints it to the terminal:

curl https://example.com

curl has many more features. Check curl.se for more information. One thing it can do is display response headers – e.g. the ones we get from our authenticating web server:

cd http-authentication/
npm start

Once the web server runs, open a new shell and enter the following command:

curl -i http://localhost:3000/

That prints (e.g.) the following information to the terminal:

HTTP/1.1 401 Unauthorized
Content-Type: text/plain
WWW-Authenticate: Basic realm="Users"
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:45:48 GMT
Connection: keep-alive
Keep-Alive: timeout=5
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

401 Unauthorized

Most interesting are:

  • The HTTP version HTTP/1.1
  • The status code 401 Unauthorized
  • The content type text/plain
  • The header field WWW-Authenticate