title: Change the location of the node_modules folder
body: <p>I'm currently trying to migrate an old ASP.NET WebSite project to Visual Studio 2015. I'd like to use NPM/Gulp to automatically compile LESS files to CSS (this task was done by WebEssentials in VS 2013).</p>
  
  <p>I added a <code>package.json</code> file to the project to load the required components. This creates a <code>node_modules</code> folder in the root of the WebSite project, and this is where my problem starts:</p>
  
  <p>Since WebSite projects don't have a project file, all files (and sub-directories) found in the project root folder, are automatically part of the project. Due to the deeply nested directory structure inside <code>node_modules</code>, this leads to errors because of too long path names.</p>
  
  <p>An easy workaround is to set the <code>hidden</code> attribute on the <code>node_modules</code> folder (but this has to be done manually by each developer).</p>
  
  <p>Is there a way to tell NPM to put the node modules into another directory e.g. one level above the project (<code>..\node_modules</code>) where the solution file is?</p>
  
  <p>Or is it possible to set the hidden attribute on a folder from a gulp-task (which runs when the project is loaded)?</p>