Any ideas how to manage/upload dependencies/pnpm-store for offline CI/CD systems without committing node_modules to version control?

[josh-hemphill]

At the moment, I'm restricted to using an Azure DevOps server that has no internet connection, but we have all our dependencies locally. Other people have been commiting node_modules to version control, but I much prefer pnpm, and I'm worried it won't be able to do that since the packages are symlinked.

Does anyone have any ideas how to manage/upload pnpm's package store to CI/CD so it can build there?
Azure DevOps has an npm package registry that doesn't require namespaces, so I thought about seeing if I can use pnpm as a library, to iterate over all dependencies and re-publish each if that package:version does not already exist.

My other thought, is if there's some way to merge pnpm cache/store, maybe some living artifact, to which all the projects upload to, to merge, so pnpm in ci/cd can be set to use that and have access to all the packages.