repositories, and serves
various purposes:</p>
<ul>
<li>Describe a single representation of a dependency tree such that teammates, deployments, and continuous integration are guaranteed to install exactly the same dependencies.</li>
<li>Provide a facility for users to "time-travel" to previous states of <code class="language-text">node_modules</code> without having to commit the directory itself.</li>
<li>To facilitate greater visibility of tree changes through readable source control diffs.</li>
<li>And op