npm equivalent of `pip install -r requirements.txt`

Question

What are the npm equivalent of:

pip freeze > requirements.txt pip install -r requirements.txt 

Answer 1

Normally dependencies in a node project are installed via package.json: https://docs.npmjs.com/files/package.json

You install each dependency with npm install --save my-dependency and it will be added to the package.json file. So the next person on the project can install all the dependencies with npm install command on the same folder of package.json.

But in my case i wanted to install global requirements of npm via a text file (similar to pip install -r requirements.txt).

You can do that with:

cat requirements.txt | xargs npm install -g

Answer 2

You might want to take a look at the documentation for npm shrinkwrap. It creates an npm-shrinkwrap.json, which will take precedence over any package.json when installing.

Basically, the equivalent is:

npm shrinkwrap npm install 

Edit:

Since v5.0.0, npm now always creates a package-lock.json, with the same format as npm-shrinkwrap.json. There have been other changes since then, not least in the latest v5.6.0. See the package-lock docs.