Speeding up the npm install

Question

I am trying to speed up the npm install during the build process phase. My package.json has the list of packages pretty much with locked revisions in it. I\'ve also configured t

Answer 1

Proposing two more modern approches:

1) npm ci

Use npm ci, which is available from npm version 5.7.0 (although I recommend 5.7.1 and upwards because of the broken release) - this requires package-lock.json to be present and it skips building your dependency tree off of your package.json file, respecting the already resolved dependency URLs in your lock file.

A very quick boost for your CI/CD envs (our build time was cut down to a quarter of the original!) and/or to make sure all your developers sit on the same versions of dependencies during development (without having to hard-code strict versions in your package.json file).

Note however that npm ci removes the node_modules/ directory before installing, so it won't benefit from any caching strategies.

2) npm i --prefer-offline

Use the --prefer-offline flag with your regular npm install / npm i. With this approach, you need to make sure you've cached your node_modules/ directory between builds (in a CI/CD environment). If it fails to find packages locally with the specific version, it falls back to the network safely.