如何防止npm安装 <package> --save-dev从重新排序devDependencies

Question

Background
We're having issues with a Windows build system hitting the file path too long error when the node modules folder has items within it that have paths which are over 260 characters.

We've discovered adding a deeply nested dependency to the top of the devDependencies section fixes this issue. The assumption is that when npm sees a nested dependency C.1 require package A , which is already declared and available in devDependencies, npm will not add dependency A to dependency C.1 's node_modules directory.

Issue
The problem I'm seeing on my local machine is that running npm install <package> --save-dev reorders the packages in devDependencies alphabetically, but the order npm process packages and their dependencies matters. If I check this in, then the build system will hit the same file path too long error.

ie If package A comes after package C and dependency C.1 requires package A , then npm will add package A to the node_modules folder of dependency C.1 .

I'm not sure if this reordering is only on my machine since I haven't seen npm reorder dependencies on my home machine before.

Has anyone seen this before or know how to stop this behavior?

Versions
Node: v0.10.32
NPM: v1.4.28

Side note: I've read that npm 2.0 or future versions will analyze the dependency hierarchy, find duplicated packages, and only reference them once on the file system, but the upgrade to npm 2.0 is not in the picture at this time.

Answer 1

The only way I see this working is to have some sort of preinstall script which [hopefully] will run after the dependencies file has been updated but before the package is installed. From the npm site :

In the current version of node, the standard way to do this is using a .gyp file. If you have a file with a .gyp extension in the root of your package, then npm will run the appropriate node-gyp commands automatically at install time

If that doesn't work, you will need to use MakeFile and rewrite the package.json file. This is not too out of the ordinary as some projects require some sort of pre-compilation - you would just instruct your team to run a separate command for installing npm packages.