Package lifecycle management extends beyond publishing. A maintainer eventually faces one of three decisions: remove a package entirely, mark it as no longer recommended while keeping it installable, or hand it to someone else. npm provides a distinct command for each, and the registry’s policies determine which commands are even permitted. The default recommendation from…
Distribution tags (dist-tags) are human-readable labels that point to specific versions of a published package. The latest tag is the one npm uses by default when a consumer runs npm install package-name without a version or tag specifier. Every other tag—next, beta, stable, canary—is a custom pointer that the publisher creates and manages. The npm…
Publishing a package to the npm registry is a single command, but the result depends on a decision made before the command runs: is the package scoped or unscoped, and is the account paid or free? The npm publish command reads the package name in package.json and applies a default access level based on whether…
Version management is the discipline of incrementing a package’s version number in a way that communicates the nature of the change to the consumers who depend on it. The npm version command automates this increment, writing the new version to package.json and package-lock.json, and—when run inside a Git repository—creating a commit and a tag that…
Publishing a package to the npm registry involves a decision that is easy to get wrong: which files from the project directory end up in the published tarball. Three mechanisms compete for this decision—.gitignore, .npmignore, and the files field in package.json—and their precedence rules are not intuitive. A .gitignore entry that excludes a secrets file…
gdisk is the GPT-aware counterpart to fdisk. It shares the same interactive, menu-driven interface—the same letters for new, delete, type, print, write, and quit—but it operates on GUID Partition Table disks exclusively. Where fdisk asks whether a partition is primary or extended, gdisk does not, because GPT has no such distinction. Every GPT partition is…
fdisk is the traditional interactive partition editor for Linux, and it remains the tool the LFCS exam expects you to know for MBR disks. Modern versions of fdisk from util-linux also handle GPT, which means a single tool can inspect and modify both table types, but the menu flow and the partition-numbering rules differ between…
Partitioning is the act of dividing a physical disk into logical regions that the operating system treats as separate block devices. Every filesystem, swap area, and LVM physical volume begins as a partition or a whole disk. The LFCS objective is not about memorizing the fdisk menu; it is about understanding the two partition table…
The root password reset is the most common boot recovery procedure and the one most likely to appear on the LFCS exam as a practical task. The procedure has three stages: interrupt the boot to reach a shell that runs before authentication, remount the filesystem so it can be written, and change the password. The…
Single-user mode is the boot state in which the system starts with minimal services and presents a root shell without requiring the normal multi-user login sequence. On systemd systems, the equivalent states are rescue.target (single-user mode, local filesystems mounted, networking stopped) and emergency.target (root mounted read-only, almost nothing else). The distinction matters for recovery: rescue.target…