[untog]

While progress=false does decrease install time a little, it's still very long. And the output is incredibly verbose - I'm doing something similar to the OP in automating builds of Node apps and npm is easily the biggest headache in the process.

BTW, "npm install --production" installs all dependencies but not devDependencies (which you can get by doing "npm install --save-dev <package>"). That way you can separate dev and prod dependencies within the same package.json file.

Feels a little backwards that you specify dev on module install but prod on app install. Maybe --production being the default and --dev being an option makes more sense, but that would be one hell of a breaking change.