Share Dependencies source in one folder like Maven, instead of installing it for each project

[yasser-mas]

Share Dependencies source in one folder like Maven, instead of installing it for each project.

Maven has ./m2/repository/ directory which has all maven dependencies sources which downloaded from maven repo website classified by package name and version.

If any project depending on any dependency during build phase, it will be collected from the local repo otherwise it will be pulled from website to local repo, also it will be available during development phase.

so it would be better if NPM support that instead of installing same dependencies sources in local folder for all projects !!

there are dependencies has large size like angular and electron , why should I duplicate the same dependencies sources in all projects which I have !! .

[ljharb]

The current mechanism allows you to make local edits in a dependency, without affecting every other project on your machine. Your suggestion (which aligns with yarn 2, pnpm, and tink's approaches) prevents that.

[yasser-mas]

editing local dependency is a special case not the normal, I'm depending on any dependency as is, If I wanna change the dependency source the best practices to create other version from that dependency and depending on it.

editing local dependency without updating it's version will lead to a huge mistakes if I want to deploy this project in other machine ( or I should upload node_modules instead of pulling it from npm repo ) so the best practices to update the edited dependency version.

So if I followed the best practices the issue which you have mentioned will not occur

[Scramjet911]

Yeah, I think the same. Also if needed there can also be an option to create a copy of the local dependency so that the user can edit.

[ljharb]

It’s quite a common thing to do for temporary local debugging.

[thescientist13]

agreed with the above from @ljharb , local project debugging and diving into node_modules is pretty common for me as well.

[travi]

i do local debugging often as well and agree that it would need to be accounted for. i'm not sure about the others, but tink had the concept of unwinding to enable this when needed while not installing locally by default