Download source from npm without installing it
How can I download the source code of a package from npm without actually installing it (i.e. without using npm install thepackage)?
You can use npm view [package name] dist.tarball which will return the URL of the compressed package file.
Here's an example using wget to download the tarball:
wget $(npm view lodash dist.tarball)
A simpler way to do this is npm pack <package_name>. This will retrieve the tarball from the registry, place it in your npm cache, and put a copy in the current working directory. See https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/pack
If you haven't installed npm, with the current public API, you can also access the information about a package in the npm registry from the URL https://registry.npmjs.org/<package-name>/.
Then you can navigate the JSON at versions > (version number) > dist > tarball to get the URL of the code archive and download it.
npm pack XXX is the quickest to type and it'll download an archive.
Alternatively:
npm v XXX dist.tarball | xargs curl | tar -xz
this command will also:
- Download the package with progress bar
- Extracts into a folder called
package