One thing we strongly believe in is the automation of repetitive tasks. It eases the workload one has to do by hand a lot and thus saves you time for implementing gorgeous web applications!
The guys at lever have written a great article about NPM joined with Docker for building deployment packages.
We follow almost exactly the same path and do use Docker as our main deployment container format.
Dependency management for our private node modules is done by Sinopia as a private registry. A good working docker image for Sinopia can be found here.
With the right setup Rome would not have been build in a day neither – but it sureley would have been deployed in one!