How to get Laz to automatically store non-stock packages in your project

[jamie]

Is there a way in project manager to get the IDE to create a sub folder in your project, named let's say "Used Non Standard Packages" and store a copy of them there when initiating a project and selecting controls/components or packages you may have installed but does not come with the lazarus stock IDE?

 Lately I have been working with a couple of older Delphi apps that were written using packages that were installed but no copies in the project source.
  I was able to find a couple of them in source form but it's a real battle trying to recover old projects without the third-party packages.

[CharlyTango]

You can use OPM (Online Package Manager) which meanwhile is provided with a Lazarus Installation (\lazarus\components\onlinepackagemanager)
Thus you can install multiple packages in a single action.

A right click in the List of available packages in OPM will bring you to possibilities to save and load individual lists of packages to be installed.

Some packages are not provided by OPM but by lazarus itself. But they are not installed automatically.

To solve this, i suggest to install Lazarus via fpcupdeluxe which creates a file named devmods.ini at the first execution. This file contains some examples how fpcupdeluxe is able to install packages from the lazarus package directory or frankly from any source including github.
 
My basic installation of Lazarus is done by fpcupdeluxe and I copy defmods.ini (in which I have defined all desired packages) into the Lazarus directory beforehand.
In a second step, I install all missing packages via OPM by right-clicking on the list and selecting my standard packages that were previously saved in a file.