@witty-crayon-22786: the thing is, to install A and B “separately” you need to be in a totally different folder for each one (or specify that theyre being installed globally with -g and specify a different —prefix for each one, as @enough-analyst-54434 suggested, to basically trick NPM into giving you an isolated environment for that particular installation), because otherwise they just get installed into node_modules under whatever folder youre in, with their dependency installations coupled as described above (the https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/install#algorithm algorithm)