Caching dependencies locally (Vendoring)

If your project has external dependencies, you may want to store them locally to avoid downloading them from the internet every time you build your project. This is especially useful when building your project on a CI server or in a Docker container, or patching or otherwise modifying the remote dependencies.

Deno offers this functionality through a setting in your deno.json file. Simply add

{
  "vendor": true
}

to your deno.json file. This will cache all dependencies locally in a vendor directory when the project is run, or you can optionally run the deno cache command to cache the dependencies immediately:

deno cache main.ts

You can then run the application as usual with deno run:

deno run main.ts

Running the Vendored Application Jump to heading#

After vendoring, you can run main.ts without internet access by using the --cached-only flag, which forces Deno to use only locally available modules.