We've all had to suffer through npm ls and it's endless trees of dependencies but there is a better way!

That way is the --depth flag. That's right, it was as easy as npm ls --depth=0. Now you can see the packages you actually installed.

That was easy... too easy... If you ran that command you probably noticed a bunch of these little buggers at the bottom of the output.

npm ERR! max depth reached: express@3.5.2, required by my-project@0.4.18

Let's fix this. Start by running sudo nano ~/.profile. If you would rather use vi for this, type alias vi='nano'; sudo vi ~/.profile. Then, add this line to the file, save, and reload ~/.profile by running source ~/.profile.

alias "npmls0"="npm ls --depth=0 2>/dev/null"

The key to this is 2>/dev/null. All it does it eat the errors.

Now you can just run npmls0 and see your npm packages and their associated versions.

Source