why npm checked for so many dependencies for single package

Question

I was running npm install to install only 1 package called generator-angular

npm install --global generator-angular

you have no idea how many dependencies this npm have checked, it is still rolling I will just pick a few

npm http GET https://registry.npmjs.org/generator-angular
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/generator-angular
....
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/diff
npm http 304 https://registry.npmjs.org/strip-ansi

are these really dependencies ? like diff ansi? or am I making some mistakes ?

• thebiglebowski11: did you end up with an error?
• zinking: @pka2012 not yet, it's just slow and last for hours. some of the sources are extremely slow here within GFW.
• mscdex: That's just the modularity of packages on npm and is fairly common. In fact it's arguably better that way to have a package to "one" thing and "one" thing well.

Answer 1

Yes, those are all real dependencies. generator-angular is a particularly heavy module.

One thing to note is that many of them are "peer dependencies". This means that they are installed next to, rather than inside, generator-angular. This allows them to be shared by your application as well as other modules with peer dependencies. So in addition to generator-angular, you are getting access to generator-karma, grunt-cli, bower, and yo.

If you are depending on any of these already, make sure you are installing all of your modules in the same place so they don't get installed multiple times.

• Aaron Dufour: @zinking Like I said, make sure they're installed in the same place. Did you install yo and bower globally as well?