npm install: when to use --no-bin-links?

Question

When and why we should use the option --no-bin-links when we install npm packages?

The official docs say:

The --no-bin-links argument will preven

Answer 1

So far one of the scenarios that I came across that --no-bin-links may help is when deploying packages in environments that may not have access to NPM Enterprise and you'd want to actually install all the packages and deploy the node_modules directly, in which case symlinks may cause some problem ( as you can't deploy them ), using this flag solve this problem.

Answer 2

One scenario that I can think of is working with a virtual machine (i.e. vagrant w/ virtual box or VMware) on windows host.
You can't translate symlinks to a synchronized folder on Windows share, so you will need this option to go around it.

Use it for any filesystem that doesn’t support symbolic links.