Download a package from npm as a tar (not installing it to a module)

Question

Is there some URL from which I can download a given package from npm (as a tarball or something)? I need the exact files that were originally uploaded to npm.

Using

Answer 1

If you need to get the tarball without having npm installed, you can fetch the package information using curl and use jq to get the right information from the JSON:

curl https://registry.npmjs.org/PACKAGE-NAME/ \
    | jq '.versions[."dist-tags".latest].dist.tarball'

This is for instance useful if you're building a Docker container that requires one npm package, and don't want to install npm just for that.