Declaring the entire node_modules directory as an input to every nodejs action has performance problems. When using local sandboxing, every file is set up in the kernel container for the sandboxed disk, this is slow on Mac. With remote execution, we guarantee these files all need to be copied to the worker machine.
Instead, we can declare individual npm packages as dependencies, e.g.:
nodejs_binary(
name = "fast",
data = ["@npm//jasmine"]
)
and only the contents of node_modules/jasmine/ will be copied to workers.
See design doc: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1AfjHMLVyE_vYwlHSK7k7yW_IIGppSxsQtPm9PTr1xEo/preview