Where does npm install the packages?
How to find out where npm installs the packages
Read the npm guide if you are starting out with npm, it’s going to go in a lot of the basic details of it.
When you install a package using npm
(or yarn), you can perform 2 types of installation:
- a local install
- a global install
By default, when you type an npm install
command, like:
npm install lodash
the package is installed in the current file tree, under the node_modules
subfolder.
As this happens, npm
also adds the lodash
entry in the dependencies
property of the package.json
file present in the current folder.
A global installation is performed using the -g
flag:
npm install -g lodash
When this happens, npm won’t install the package under the local folder, but instead, it will use a global location.
Where, exactly?
The npm root -g
command will tell you where that exact location is on your machine.
On macOS or Linux this location could be /usr/local/lib/node_modules
.
On Windows it could be C:\Users\YOU\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules
If you use nvm
to manage Node.js versions, however, that location would differ.
I for example use nvm
and my packages location was shown as /Users/flavio/.nvm/versions/node/v8.9.0/lib/node_modules
.
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