Specify path to node modules in package json

Question

Is there a way to move the node modules directory in an application to let s say  vendor node modules like bower does with the bowerrc file  I thought it could be specified in package json but I can t seem to find a solution  Your help is much appreciated

User · Accepted Answer

yes you can  just set the NODE PATH env variable    export NODE PATH  yourdir  node modules   According to the doc        If the NODE PATH environment variable is set to a colon-delimited list   of absolute paths  then node will search those paths for modules if   they are not found elsewhere   Note  On Windows  NODE PATH is   delimited by semicolons instead of colons        Additionally  node will search in the following locations       1   HOME  node modules       2   HOME  node libraries       3   PREFIX lib node      Where  HOME is the user s home directory  and  PREFIX is node s   configured node prefix       These are mostly for historic reasons  You are highly encouraged to   place your dependencies locally in node modules folders  They will be   loaded faster  and more reliably    Source

User · Answer

Yarn supports this feature      yarnrc file in project root --modules-folder  node modules   But your experience can vary depending on which packages you use  I m not sure you d want to go into that rabbit hole

User · Answer

I m not sure if this is what you had in mind  but I ended up on this question because I was unable to install node modules inside my project dir as it was mounted on a filesystem that did not support symlinks  a VM  shared  folder    I found the following workaround    Copy the package json file to a temp folder on a different filesystem Run npm install there Copy the resulting node modules directory back into the project dir  using cp -r --dereference to expand symlinks into copies    I hope this helps someone else who ends up on this question when looking for a way to move node modules to a different filesystem   Other options  There is another workaround  which I found on the github issue that  Charminbear linked to  but this doesn t work with grunt because it does not support NODE PATH as per https   github com browserify resolve issues 136      lets say you have  media sf shared and you can t install symlinks in   there  which means you can t actually npm install from    media sf shared myproject because some modules use symlinks            mkdir  home dan myproject  amp  amp  cd  home dan myproject      ln -s  media sf shared myproject package json  you can symlink in this   direction  just can t create one inside of  media sf shared      npm install     cd  media sf shared myproject     NODE PATH  home dan myproject node modules node index js

User · Answer

In short  It is not possible  and as it seems won t ever be supported  see here https   github com npm npm issues 775    There are some hacky work-arrounds with using the CLI or ENV-Variables  see the current selected answer    npmrc-Config-Files or npm link - what they all have in common  They are never just project-specific  but always some kind of global Solutions    For me  none of those solutions are really clean because contributors to your project always need to create some special configuration or have some special knowledge - they can t just npm install and it works   So  Either you will have to put your package json in the same directory where you want your node modules installed  or live with the fact that they will always be in the root-dir of your project

[node.js] Specify path to node_modules in package.json

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