I see that there is a devDependencies for only installing packages on the development server. Does such a thing exist for only installing packages on the production server?
No, there's not a productionDependencies package.json attribute. To toggle on/off the installation of devDependencies, you'd could the NODE_ENV environment variable. See more here
.
If that isn't enough, you could certainly define some custom scripts for npm that install production-specific dependencies, though. npm has support for custom scripts, which you can read about here.
you can skip installing the dev dependencies by executing npm install --production
You can also achieve the same by setting the NODE_ENV environment to production