This originally appeared on coderwall.

I have read How to fork & patch npm modules and followed the instructions but I couldn’t make it work for me. Looking at npm log I figured that the problem was with zip files being downloaded and not tarballs. So here’s the trick on how to include your GitHub repository correctly in npm:

1. Go to fork’s page
2. Go to commits
3. On the right side of the commit you want to use click “Browse code”
4. On the browse code page right-click on “Download ZIP” button (or whatever it is that you are seeing) and copy the URL. It should be something like this https://github.com/SoftwareMarbles/express-jsend/archive/fdd4089087d916fa6e3b5abaa1ff9dd9ea96df8d.zip.
5. Edit that URL replacing archive with tarball and removing the .zip extension. You should end up with something like https://github.com/SoftwareMarbles/express-jsend/tarball/fdd4089087d916fa6e3b5abaa1ff9dd9ea96df8d.
6. Paste that into your package.json instead of the version. Like this:

"express-jsend": "https://github.com/SoftwareMarbles/express-jsend/tarball/fdd4089087d916fa6e3b5abaa1ff9dd9ea96df8d"

And that’s it - npm install works as it should and installs the module from the link.

Last modified on 2014-01-17