That doesn't mean it's a good idea to. NPM does a great job of distribiting development dependencies and Node.js applications. It's not really intended for no

That doesn't mean it's a good idea to. NPM does a great job of distribiting development dependencies and Node.js applications. It's not really intended for non-js binary builds and platform-specific dependencies. You can always use NPM to install directly from specific repo release but you'll still have to have to include a native compile-to-platform step somewhere.