I created a new ember project with ember new my-application. By default, it will download and extract all modules in the "node_modules" directory. I don't want it because it will be include in my git repo, when I do a global search, it includes all modules, etc.
Is there a way to install all modules globally? Is it a best practice?
When you execute ember new it will add a .gitignore to your project that excludes node_modules, bower_components, tmp and dist so those should never end up in your repository.
The searching part has no general solution though most editors you use can somehow exclude folders from being searched so I would look into it that way.
Node modules can be installed globally but you will quite quickly run into problems when you need different versions for different projects. Ember CLI is installed globally initially (npm install -g ember-cli) which enables you to do ember new from anywhere but then there is also a local one inside each project so that you can upgrade your globally installed one without messing with all your older projects.
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Can I put the node_modules directory outside my project just the way maven does with its dependencies?
Sort of. The node_modules directory is not actually a feature of npm but a feature of node.js.
How node.js uses node_modules.
When you require a module node.js will search for a node_modules directory from the current directory upwards. That means if it can't find one in the current directory (which may actually be a subdirectory of your project instead of your project directory) it will look for it in the parent directory then the parent's parent all the way to your root directory.
For example, you can have a project structure like this:
/node_modules <-------------------- modules available to all projects
/code
/project_A
/node_modules <------ modules available to project A
/lib
/node_modules <-- modules available to the lib directory
/project_B
/node_modules <------ modules available to project B
This way you can have some modules shared by multiple projects and some modules that are project specific and even some modules that are only available to some files in your project.
How npm handles node_modules
Note however that npm has only one interpretation of node_modules. It only manages node_modules in your project directory. Specifically the directory that contains the package.json file.
So yes, you can do it but npm won't understand what you are doing and your package.json will contain incomplete dependencies. I wouldn't recommend doing this with projects involving multiple developers because it will look more like a misconfigured development environment - basically others will think this is a bug. However I personally have used such structures for personal projects where I don't care about my package.json file.
As mention in this question Don't do it. Let NPM work the way it's designed to. However, to save space, you can delete the node_modules folder on projects that are currently dormant, and recreate it with a single shot of npm install when you switch back to them.
It is an issue if the plugin declares to install the modules in a configurable directory. Therefore I suggest to fix the documentation, it gives false hopes.
Please see npm docs, as this is the default behaviour of npm. Not a frontend-maven-plugin issue.
Yes you can, but you should try to avoid doing so.
npm install will always install the modules within node_modules folder in your parent working directory.
Whenever you install a module using npm install -g module_name, it installs modules globally outside your project directory which can be also used in other projects, normally some dev dependencies are installed globally which helps you in development purpose.
An example would be
npm install -g #angular/cli , doing this once will enable you to use ng commands to build ,test other angular projects as well.
Other than this,it would be ideal if all the node_modules which are required for your project would stay in the working directory of your project.
Installing anything globally outside your project is considered bad practice as different projects may depend on different versions of the same node_module.Installing node_modules locally within the project directory allows different projects to have different versions of same node_module.
I am exploring nodejs and js frameworks. I noticed that when I create a project, for example with vue
vue init webpack my-project
I get a HUGE directory named node_modules containing a lot of things not related to my project. Newbie in this field my only wish is to gitignore this folder or better, put it somewhere else.
Is it common to have local modules to a project? Is there a way to install all these dependencies globally or in a dedicated environment (e.g Python virtualenv)?
The directory does contain libraries that are required by your project - and their dependencies. From my experience, the dependencies of the libraries I'm using are about 3/4 of the folder size.
You can install a library globally using the -g switch of npm, I'm not sure if vue has similar option. But this is not recommended - the point of installing libraries with your project is that the project will remember which libraries belong to it, those are saved in package.json.
You could copy the node_modules directory to the root of your hard-drive and merge it with other node_modules directories, but you're risking that you'll mix different library versions that way, so this is not recommended.
Unless you're running low on free space, just leave it be. Remember to add the node_modules to .gitignore if you're using git.
In short, node_modules is a place where all your project dependencies are stored. And allows you to use these dependencies in the code if you want to and allows for the modules itself to have it own dependencies if any.
And it is very common or rather always the case when a local node_modules folder is created.
You can install dependencies globally by doing npm install -g module_name command via your CLI. But these may cause the issue if the global paths are not configured properly.Also, it is not advisable to keep all the required dependencies by an application in global context.
If you do not want some dependencies to be part of your production environment you can install them as dev dependencies via npm install--save-dev module_name command. These(normal & dev dependencies) will be installed when a developer clones your project and run npm install locally to run the project and run tests. But to ignore these from being installed on production you can execute npm install --production command, this will make sure that only dependencies required for your code to run will be installed in the node_modules folder.
I am new to node, i have made few small application using node, but everytime i have to use npm install for every application which download the required dependencies in node_modules folder. There are many libraries which are common.
I tried installing using npm install express -g but i was not sure how to use this dependency in other application which is in some other folder.
Is there any way i can have only one folder like in D:\Users\User\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules from where my all applications can have the module which they need ?
Can anyone let me know how to do the settings for the same ?
Any help would be highly appreciated !!
Every node application that has a package.json has a specific set of rules for using specific versions of it's modules. You can install globally only one version of a specific module, but if you happen to have an application that needs an older / newer version that is not installed globally on your dev environment, then it will fail to work.
The recommended way of using node modules ( packages ) is to have a local directory inside your project, which contains all libraries that the project needs. This practice is everywhere and so you should follow it.
There are some ways to mitigate the slow npm install, though.
There is a new npm-replacement, created and maintained by Facebook, called yarn.
What yarn does is it creates a local cache of all installed packages and then symlinks them to your project folder from your local computer cache. This way the npm install procedure becomes very fast.
I am rather new to Node but am working on a project behind a very restrictive firewall so I cannot use npm to install packages (no proxy either). I am trying to use express and have been able to include it by just storing the files locally and requiring the local file path but I do not know how to structure the project so that node can find and include all of the dependencies for express (which I also have manually downloaded from github and stored locally within the project). Does anyone know how to do a completely manual global or local install of individual node dependency packages?
Simply download the files and place them in a 'node_modules' folder in the root of your app. Then use 'npm init' to create a package.json. Add your dependencies in the dependencies list in that file.
Then run simply 'npm install'.
I am new to Node and I don't fully understand yet what installing locally means exactly. I know I need to install gulp both globally as well as locally but in my case I have a number of projects in separate folders under a development folder and I wonder if I really need to install the livereload extension locally in each separate project folder (which is what the documentation seems to suggest) would it not be easier to install it globally; or locally in the main development folder. Can someone explain how this works and what options I'd have.
Similarly I wonder whether if I install gulp locally in the development folder will this be available to each of it's children or whether I'd again need/want to install it in each project folder locally.
Here is an, albiet old, article on the node js blog that goes over locally vs globally. http://blog.nodejs.org/2011/03/23/npm-1-0-global-vs-local-installation
The basics are that if you want to require require('gulp-livereload') inside of your code it should be a local (dev) dependency. If you wish to interact with the module via the cli then install globally. For example you might have both gulp and nodemon installed globally.
The point of local install is that someone can bring down your project, type 'npm install' and get all of the dependencies local to that app.
So to answer your question install gulp-livereload locally. But other modules such as gulp, nodemon, etc you would have both global and local.
As an extra help if you want to install gulp as a project dependency but have it globally as well you can run 'npm link gulp' in order to keep them in sync.
Also, you can have just one global version while, using the local one, you can use for a specific project the specific version used while developing it.