npm install 和手动安装有什么区别？

Question

So i'm looking at requirejs. I can either install this package with npm install requirejs, or download it manually from the website. What's the difference? Are there tradeoffs to either one? Is npm install just a fancier way of manually installing? Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, npm install is just a fancier way to add package that help saving your precious time.

Base on the description here: npm install .

If the package has a package-lock, or an npm shrinkwrap file, or a yarn lock file, the installation of dependencies will be driven by that

Install the dependencies in the local node_modules folder.

In global mode (ie, with -g or --global appended to the command), it installs the current package context (ie, the current working directory) as a global package.

By default, npm install will install all modules listed as dependencies in package.json.

With the --production flag (or when the NODE_ENV environment variable is set to production), npm will not install modules listed in devDependencies. To install all modules listed in both dependencies and devDependencies when NODE_ENV environment variable is set to production, you can use --production=false.

Without a package manager like npm or yarn, it could take you a lot of time just for installing stuff. And while you are developing with node js, you'd have ton of things to install.

Every modern programming language has it's own package manager, so why you ever need to manually install them?

Answer 2

imagine you have 10 libraries in package.json, and you want to install all of them at once, you can just do "npm i" and it will take care of all, in just ~10sec. compare this with installing those 10 lib manually, it is indeed a good friend, to help you ease the process of downloading lib for you in no time.