Question: Is there some URL from which I can download a given package from npm (as a tarball or something)? I need the exact files that were originally uploaded to npm.

Using `npm install` gets a different, generated package.json for example. I want the exact original set of files that was published.

Answer: 
You can use [`npm view`](https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/view) to get the URL to the registry's tarball (in this example for the module `level`):

```
$ npm view level dist.tarball

```

And to download tarball, you can use [`npm pack`](https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/pack):

```
$ npm pack level

```
If you need to get the tarball **without having npm installed**, you can fetch the package information using `curl` and use `jq` to get the right information from the JSON:

```
curl https://registry.npmjs.org/PACKAGE-NAME/ \
    | jq '.versions[."dist-tags".latest].dist.tarball'

```

This is for instance useful if you're building a Docker container that requires one npm package, and don't want to install npm just for that.