kadence on npm: the registry and the search page disagree

If you search for kadence npm package you get nine pages about a distributed hash table. If you run npm install kadence you get a command-line task journal. Both of those are true at the same time, and the gap between them is worth five minutes because it will otherwise cost you an afternoon.

I know it costs an afternoon because it caught me. A page on this site said, until today, that npm install kadence does not install this project. I had read the search results and not the registry. The registry is the thing that decides.

What is actually published

Read from registry.npmjs.org today:

The bare name resolves to this project: description, homepage https://kadence.guru, the bogutskiandriy/kadence repository, MIT licence, 375 KB unpacked, first published 2026-09-03, currently at 0.8.1. Nothing is deprecated and there is no scope to remember.

The dead forward

The interesting row is the last one.

@kadenceproject/kadence is deprecated, and npm prints its notice every time somebody installs it: "Kadence is now published under @deadcanaries/kadence. This version will no longer be maintained so update your package.json!"

That package does not exist. https://registry.npmjs.org/@deadcanaries/kadence answers 404 with {"error":"Not found"}, and npm view reports '@deadcanaries/kadence@*' is not in this registry. I checked it three ways because it is a strong claim to make about somebody else's package.

So a developer following that instruction lands nowhere. If you want the DHT framework, the copy that is still installable and not deprecated is kadence-kim, last published 2018-04-09. That is not a recommendation — an eight-year-old networking library is a decision to make with your eyes open — it is just where the code went.

Why the search page shows you none of this

The nine results for kadence npm package are Snyk's health page for kadence-kim, the deprecated scoped package, a jsDelivr CDN copy of it, kadence-kim itself, the npm page for the package that no longer exists, a @pointnetwork mirror, two GitHub mirrors, and kad — the framework's predecessor.

Not one of them is the package the bare name resolves to.

That is not a conspiracy and it is not a ranking failure to be fixed. The framework has been on npm since 2018 and has accumulated the links, the mirrors, the CDN copies and the security-scanner pages that a package accumulates over eight years. This package was first published 2026-09-03. The search page is showing you an accurate picture of what the web has written about the name, and the registry is showing you what the name currently points at. Those are different questions and today they have different answers.

The rule that follows: for any package name, the registry is authoritative and the search page is history. npm view <name> settles in one command what a search page will mislead you about for an afternoon.

What npm install kadence gets you

So you can tell whether it is the thing you were looking for before you install anything:

• a CLI, version 0.8.1, MIT licensed, 125 KB packed and 375 KB unpacked
• it keeps tasks, their history and time as append-only events inside your git repository — no database, no hosted service, no account
• the terminal board loads 1.8 MB of UI library, and only when you open it; the CLI itself is 149 KB
• an agent asking it one question reads 982 bytes, and that stays flat as the project grows

If you wanted a Kademlia implementation, you want kadence-kim and you want to read its age first. If you wanted a WordPress theme, that is not on npm under this name at all.

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