# Add a development dependency (/guides/install/add-dev)

<!-- agent-signals: reading_time_min: 1 · est_tokens: 92 · updated: 2026-07-28 -->
Related: [Add a dependency](/guides/install/add.md), [Add an optional dependency](/guides/install/add-optional.md), [Add a peer dependency](/guides/install/add-peer.md), [Add a Git dependency](/guides/install/add-git.md), [Add a tarball dependency](/guides/install/add-tarball.md), [Install a package under a different name](/guides/install/npm-alias.md)

To add an npm package as a development dependency, use `bun add --development`.

```sh icon="terminal" title="terminal" terminal
bun add zod --dev
bun add zod -d # shorthand
```

***

This adds the package to `devDependencies` in `package.json`.

```json
{
  "devDependencies": {
    "zod": "^3.0.0" // [!code ++]
  }
}
```

***

See [`bun install`](/pm/cli/install).
