Aardvark ships the islands JS toolchain — nothing to install

A fresh site builds its interactive components with no npm install and nothing downloaded. Release binaries carry a digest-pinned store of the whole dependency tree the islands need — React, every @mantine/* package the built-ins use, the community-component packages, the Twoslash render dependencies and esbuild with its native binaries. When a project has no node_modules of its own, the build stages that store into .aardvark-cache/node_modules/, extracted and checked against a recorded sha256, never executed, and entirely offline.

Node.js is still the one build-machine prerequisite — the toolchain ships with Aardvark, but something has to run it. See Installation for the version floor.

Your project always wins, wholesale. A real node_modules (or a workspace’s hoisted tree) means the store never serves and any copy Aardvark staged earlier is removed, so it can’t shadow yours. And a package.json asking for packages or versions the store doesn’t carry falls back to the existing automatic npm ci/npm install rather than being quietly served different versions. A source checkout — or a binary built without the vendoring step — keeps that automatic-npm behavior as before.

This generalizes what the map runtime did for one component: it ships beside the store, so {% map %} no longer asks you to install anything either.