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 npm install gets a different, generated package.json for example. I want the exact original set of files that was published.

Answer 1

You can use npm view to get the URL to the registry's tarball (in this example for the module level):

$ npm view level dist.tarball 

And to download tarball, you can use npm pack:

$ npm pack level