I've got an irritating little bug with AWS, where I create my workspace (in this case, npm install) and distribute it to a bunch of slaves. Part of the install lifecycle for npm creates a bunch of symlinks in ./node_modules/.bin. Unfortunately, S3 doesn't support symlinks (see this question).
Now, it's a bit unfortunate that I'm downloading a prebuilt ./node_modules from S3, but it's how it's gotta be done (outside the scope of the question). When I run npm install on the slave, node doesn't recreate the symlinks.
I could always add a pretest hook to recreate the symlinks manually, but that's what got me wondering: is there a way to invoke specific parts of the npm lifecycle manually? If not, why? Running only parts of the install could be useful -- at least, here.
