Check out this link to npm's faq. Basically, you want to use the npm-link command. Go through your package.json and, for each dependency, do a sudo npm install -g <packagename>
. Then link that package to your local project( see npm help link
).
The reason this is not the default behavior is that managing dependencies for multiple projects is a headache. Space is assumed to be cheap (and it is); having copies of dependencies is considered a low price to pay for fewer package version conflicts.