How to get a tarball from npm for the Node agent

Objective

How to download a tarball file for the Node agent.

Process

1. Run npm view @contrast/agent dist.tarball
2. That command will generate a URL you can paste in a browser to download the tgz file of the <latest> Node.js agent
   
   For example:

   ❯ npm view @contrast/agent dist.tarball
   https://registry.npmjs.org/@contrast/agent/-/agent-4.24.2.tgz

Alternate approach

If you need to get the tarball without having npm installed, you can fetch the package information using curl and jq to get the right information from the JSON. This is for instance useful if you're building a Docker container that requires one npm package, and you don't want to install npm just for that.

curl https://registry.npmjs.org/PACKAGE-NAME/ \ | jq '.versions[."dist-tags".latest].dist.tarball'

For example:

❯ curl https://registry.npmjs.org/@contrast/agent/ | jq '.versions[."dist-tags".latest].dist.tarball'
"https://registry.npmjs.org/@contrast/agent/-/agent-4.24.2.tgz"

Reference

https://stackoverflow.com/a/51318312