I have a node project. I want to use npm once to fetch a dependency, but from then on, do not depend on the npm registry. The packages installed may need to be compiled/built on different operating systems, not all the packages are pure JS.
I do not want an npm mirror, as I do not need all of npm. I just need the specific versions of the packages I need in my project. I would always set dependency versions to exact version numbers, and would explicitly do version upgrades when I needed. My ideal work flow:
mkdir project-node_modules
cd project-node_modules
mkdir node_modules
# install a bunch of packages, but only in source form, no building