How to specify local modules as npm package dependencies

npm install now supports this

npm install --save ../path/to/mymodule

For this to work mymodule must be configured as a module with its own package.json. See Creating NodeJS modules.

As of npm 2.0, local dependencies are supported natively. See danilopopeye's answer to a similar question. I've copied his response here as this question ranks very high in web search results.

This feature was implemented in the version 2.0.0 of npm. For example:

{
  "name": "baz",
  "dependencies": {
    "bar": "file:../foo/bar"
  }
}

Any of the following paths are also valid:

../foo/bar
~/foo/bar
./foo/bar
/foo/bar

syncing updates

Since npm install <folder> adds the package in the directory as a symlink in the current project any changes to the local package are automatically synced.

See: Local dependency in package.json

It looks like the answer is npm link: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/link

I couldn't find a neat way in the end so I went for create a directory called local_modules and then added this bashscript to the package.json in scripts->preinstall

#!/bin/sh
for i in $(find ./local_modules -type d -maxdepth 1) ; do
    packageJson="${i}/package.json"
    if [ -f "${packageJson}" ]; then
        echo "installing ${i}..."
        npm install "${i}"
    fi
done

After struggling much with the npm link command (suggested solution for developing local modules without publishing them to a registry or maintaining a separate copy in the node_modules folder), I built a small npm module to help with this issue.

The fix requires two easy steps.

First:

npm install lib-manager --save-dev

Second, add this to your package.json:

{  
  "name": "yourModuleName",  
  // ...
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "./node_modules/.bin/local-link"
  }
}

More details at https://www.npmjs.com/package/lib-manager. Hope it helps someone.

You can just add to your package.json file in your project

"package-name" : "path/to/package"

and then run npm i in your project

If it's acceptible to simply publish your modules preinstalled in node_modules alongside your other files, you can do it like this:

// ./node_modules/foo/package.json
{ 
  "name":"foo",
  "version":"0.0.1",
  "main":"index.js"
}

// ./package.json
...
"dependencies": {
  "foo":"0.0.1",
  "bar":"*"
}

// ./app.js
var foo = require('foo');

You may also want to store your module on git and tell your parent package.json to install the dependency from git: https://npmjs.org/doc/json.html#Git-URLs-as-Dependencies

At work we have a common library that is used by a few different projects all in a single repository. Originally we used the published (private) version (npm install --save rp-utils) but that lead to a lot of needless version updates as we developed. The library lives in a sister directory to the applications and we are able to use a relative path instead of a version. Instead of "rp-utils": "^1.3.34" in package.json it now is:

{ 
  "dependencies": { ...
    "rp-utils": "../rp-utils",
   ...

the rp-utils directory contains a publishable npm package

use local-install

I had issues with conflicting react installations from the local dependency. I solved the error by using local-install npm package. This package does not create symlinks, which solved my issue.

Steps:

run npm i -g local-install run npx install-local --save inside the target repository to install the local dependency

Further reading: https://www.npmjs.com/package/install-local

The error I received, when trying to install the local package with npm install --save <local-directory>:

Error: Invalid hook call. Hooks can only be called inside of the body of a function component. This could happen for one of the following reasons: You might have mismatching versions of React and the renderer (such as React DOM) You might be breaking the Rules of Hooks You might have more than one copy of React in the same app