One project that I worked on recently had a grand total of 15000 files, and as we all know, those are usually small files. Thousands of files can be a headache for everyone, and I am wondering if there is a way to tarball the node\_modules folder and tell nodejs to pull all dependencies from that folder. 

My understanding is that a module should never write to its own folder as it may not have the required permissions, so I would think this would work.

It doesn't have to be tarball, just something that gets everything in less than ten files. It could also be one file per dependency in package.json.