What is npminstall?

npminstall is an alternative to the standard npm install command that downloads and sets up JavaScript packages for your project. Its main goal is to make this process faster and easier, so you spend less time waiting for dependencies to download and install. At a high level, it achieves this speed by changing how downloaded packages are stored on your computer. Instead of creating duplicate copies of the same package across different projects, it saves one central copy of everything and uses shortcuts (called symlinks) to connect them to your projects. It also handles the standard tasks you would expect, like installing packages from folders, compressed files, web addresses, or GitHub, and it supports global installations. Beyond using it as a command-line tool, developers can also integrate it directly into other JavaScript applications as a library. This tool is designed for JavaScript developers and teams who want to speed up their workflow, especially in regions where package downloads can be slow. For example, it includes a "china" mode that automatically routes downloads through faster, local mirrors. It is also used behind the scenes by cnpm, an alternative npm client popular in China. The benchmarks in the project show it installing packages roughly two to three times faster than the standard npm tool. One notable tradeoff of this approach is how it handles the node_modules folder, which is where installed packages live. Because of the shortcut system, you generally need to clear out that folder and start fresh if an installation fails halfway through. The README also notes that it does not support installing from "shrinkwrap" files, which are a standard way to lock down exact package versions, though it does support other methods of managing dependencies.