how to use npm to install all node modules in local network?

Question

My node app will deploy in a bank that can't access the internet. Can I download all the node modules in a local directory, and install them from it, or just copy the node_modules to the bank machines? Any safe and practical advise will be highly appreciated, thank you.

OR
How to add node_modules dependencies without using internet .

Answer 1

Add offline-npm to your project to serve a npm compatible tgz file wich contains all dependencies for offline installation with npm install.

Additionally you can use offline-npm -n to install packages from your local npm cache directory

For installation

npm install -g offline-npm

Usage

1) Open terminal and go to your project you want to prepare for offline use. This folder needs to contain a package.json file.

2) Prepare your project for offline use

offline-npm --add

3) This changes the package.json file and adds a offline folder which will contain all your dependencies.

Pack your project

npm pack

For more details , visit the Link
Hope this answer gets useful to you .

Answer 2

Typically you will want to bundle your node_modules into your deployable artifact.

There are some gotchas here around any native dependencies as you need to match the nodejs version of the build environment with the target system.

The easiest way to achieve this in my experience is by using docker to build and package your deployment. Though it is possible to do when running directly on host machines, you may find it safest to just avoid the usage of native dependencies to remove any risk of things breaking from a nodejs or os update.

I've also successfully achieved this packaging the nodejs binary into my deployment artifact that was deployed directly on centos hosts, however we had a mixture of centos 6 and centos 7 hosts at the time, which brought additional complexity related to different glibc versions causing nodejs to fail to start with the system provided library.

In short if you can I would use docker to package your application into a completely self contained image.