You create a new app and start with this package.json:

{
  "name": "my-app",
  "description": "My awesome app",
  "version": "1.0.0",
}

Can you spot what’s wrong?

Well, everything actually.

There are a ton of properties — name, version, description, keywords, authors, etc — that are designed packages published to npm. They power things like the npm info and npm search commands. Perfect for finding just the right framework or library.

But apps aren’t like that. In fact, package.json has a way to declare that you are not going to publish this package:

{
  "private": true
}

So start with that, then add scripts and dependencies as you need them. But don’t add any properties meant for publishing packages. Otherwise, you’ll create false affordances.

If you need a place for others to read about your app, do yourself a favor and write a README.md instead. Your coworkers will thank you.

The one exception…

If you need a central place to put your app’s metadata where you will programmatically access it, then I won’t judge you for putting it in package.json. For example, if you wanted to templetize your docs so that your app’s name and version came directly from the name and version fields in package.json.