I'm adding dependencies to a package.json that will be used as part of a provisioning process for a virtual machine. As such, I don't actually need to install the modules locally since the provisioner will do that for me inside the VM. So is there any way to do the following:
npm install --save <module>
So that it only creates a dependency for the latest version of the module in package.json without actually downloading the module or creating a node_modules folder?
The --dry-run option is close, as it doesn't create a node_modules folder but it also doesn't write to package.json either.
For now, I'm manually doing the following each time I need to update packages before re-provisioning the VM:
rm -rf node_modules
Other reasons for this might include being able to easily build a package.json file in low-bandwidth situations such as tethering, where you know you'll need the module eventually but don't want to spare the bandwidth.
There is no way to do that with npm that I'm aware of.
There are two npm packages for doing this; I've never used either of them, but they might be worth a try:
Hope this helps!