How to make changes to files in `node_modules`?.md

Making changes is easy. The important thing is to preserve the changes. A change to node_modules occurs any time we install or remove a package.

To preserve the changes, we can add the file to version control by running:

git add -f <path to the file in node_modules>

This way, the original version can be restored from Git.

The next step is automating this. To do so, we can define a wrapper shell function for the npm command. For example, in Bash:

npm ()
{
  case "$1" in
  install|remove) env npm "$@" && git checkout "$(env npm root)" ;;
  *) env npm "$@" ;;
  esac
}

npm root points to the node_modules path in the current npm project. This way, whenever we successfully run install or remove on npm, it will automatically be followed by checking out node_modules in the current repository, hence restoring the custom files in node_modules.