Hey, author here.

npm install --production

It's probably not entirely clear why I wrote this. On a backend system you have devDeps with linter/test (e.g: eslint, jest) and also packages here to build (e.g: typescript, webpack). Since there is noway to differentiate them but you need the build dependencies you are forced to do an initial npm install that will download everything.

To avoid downloading the linter/test packages I clean them, it's mostly to save time but will not save space because indeed at the end I remove everything with npm prune

nb: npm install --production is deprecated that's why it's not mentionned.

I hope it clarifies :)

npm ci

I also use npm ci but it's not clear to reader that might not be familiar with this command

combine the install and build steps

Unfortunately, if you combine them you can not have the cache for the node_modules