How am I supposed to find out what is the latest stable version of an npm package?

Question

Other than going to http://search.npmjs.org and search for it?

I usually need the version to put it in my package.json.

Answer 1

Use npm view [package-name] dist-tags in the command line.

Example:

$ npm view express dist-tags

{ latest: '2.5.9',
  '3.0': '3.0.0beta2' }