npm/gulp grabbing lots of modules that are not defined in the package.json

Question

I really am struggling to understand why in every video tutorial I follow exactly where I simply run the "npm install" or even "gulp install" it downloads a lot of modules (at least 150 separate node modules that aren't even defined in my package.json file) that I have no clue what they are or what they do but I've attempted to research the issue with not a whole lot of success!

Answer 1

What you're seeing are module dependencies being installed. You may only depend on/install a few modules, but those modules may have their own set of dependencies and each of those dependencies may their own dependencies, and so on.