node_modules sanity

npm_sanity.md

###npm sanity

Does running npm install on a new project take a long time on your system?

Few things will wrangle high install/build times for node modules better than following this rule:

1. Each time you npm install a project you're working on, take note of the npm modules that are installed into /node_modules. You can tail to a log file when running npm install, or you can open the /node_modules sub-directory within your project to see a list of everything that was installed.
2. For each of the modules installed there, install them globally instead, so that they don't have to be installed per-project every time. You can install a package from npm globally by using the global flag -g.

Example: npm install -g package-name

Here's an example that will copy the name of every node module in the project to your clipboard (OSX*). In your project root, enter:

find node_modules -type d | pbcopy

Tedious? Definitely. But you'll only have to do it once.

Congrats! Now your build times are 30 seconds instead of MAX_INT minutes.

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*If using Linux, you'll need to use xclip, or a similar library instead of pbcopy.

Cool Fact Corner:

This housekeeping method applies to most package managers.

does this apply to npm 3 where all node module deps are "hoisted" to the root of node_modules

so I thought the hoisting features were system-wide, between the 3.0+ updates and dedupe, and that it'd handle things and maximize the lowest-possible redundancy. But I was entirely shitswaggled when I discovered countless module/dep dupes all over the place, hella redundant.

Internal dep structures within each project seem to be light years better for me since updating, though.

:shitswaggled emoji: