npm is installing dependencies in a weird recursive way

Question

I used npm install --dev to install the dependencies listed in a package.json file and it seems that rather than installing all the packages in a f

Answer 1

Don't worry, that's actually the way Npm was designed. You may even see the same module installed many times (though typically with different versions).

The idea is that each module installed under node_modules is a somewhat self-contained installation of that module with its dependencies and the necessary versions -- it doesn't depend on modules installed globally.

If you are worried about inefficiency of modules being installed multiple times, the experimental npm dedupe.

Answer 2

dedupe is helpful, as Jonathan Warden says. However, try npm3. For a simple package such as gulp-jscs the install of npm3 was 20% fewer files, 5% less disk space. And tree depth went from 22 to 5. However npm3 was 2x slower for me.