Avoid npm refresh after every deployment on Heroku

I'm the maintainer of the official Heroku Node.js Buildpack.

We have a new version of the buildpack in beta that features caching support, designed specifically for the use case you described above. You can read more about it at https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs/tree/diet#about-this-refactor

Eventually this will become the default Node.js buildpack on Heroku, but if you want to use it now you'll need to set the BUILPACK_URL config var explicitly:

heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/heroku/heroku-buildpack-nodejs#diet -a my-node-appgit commit -am "fakeout" --allow-emptygit push heroku

Seems like there has recently been progress by David Dollar at the heroku-buildpack-nodejs.

In short:

heroku config:set BUILDPACK_URL=https://github.com/ddollar/heroku-buildpack-nodejs

See answer here:https://stackoverflow.com/a/18535675/1318839

You can add both .js and native npm packages and still avoid the "refresh", (at least the re-downloading part of the "refresh".)

Include the native packages to your node_modules/ directory. When you deploy to Heroku, npm install will skip the downloading of the package. npm rebuild is also run. It will take some time to re-compile the native packages, but it should be very bearable unless you have tons of native packages.

Sidenote: Heroku doc on what Heroku does when you push a nodejs app.

Sidenote: The npm rebuild is needed because there "are mysterious failures that can happen between node and native code modules after a node upgrade".