There's nothing in node that can replace Django. Django does so much.

NPM is a wasteland of abandoned projects and nested npm_modules with broken symlinks to or from a bin that'll never work on your vm's shared directory (unless it's VMWare I guess, some kind of secret sauce they use).

Having said that, they're all ok tools that people use to build pretty cool things. I just think there's got to be a better way, and I think it's somewhere in between an extern and npm/pip thing where you store your dependencies somewhere where you don't have to worry about a site being down during deploy and versioning issues.

It's like you freeze and shrinkwrap, but by actually capturing everything you need once your shit works and putting it somewhere where you control not someone else.