3.4 KiB
| title | excerpt | date | tags | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Running locally installed node packages | How to run binaries of locally installed node packages. | 2018-10-24 |
|
Installing a package with --global introduce more trouble than convenience. Here's how to run binaries of locally installed node packages.
By default, npm install installs packages as listed in package.json at 'node_modules' of your project folder. When a package ships with executables/binaries, usually user would install it globally using sudo npm install --global/-g.
But you should try to avoid using --global. Installing globally means using a specific version of a package across different projects. It might be fine in certain use cases, but it would cause version conflict time when different project depends on different versions.
Let say Hexo. It ships with hexo binary, so you can run hexo generate or hexo server
If you install it locally, the shell would complain 'hexo' command not found when you try to run it. There are two methods of running the binaries, without using --global.
Method 1
You can add ./node_modules/.bin to $PATH. The beginning dot is so that it can work in any folder as long your current folder has node_modules folder. This way, you don't have to add all your project folder to $PATH.
There are different ways of adding a folder to $PATH. If you simply run export PATH="$PATH:./node_modules/.bin", it's only temporary and would be gone as soon as you close the terminal.
To make the value persistent, the recommended way is to add it to .profile of your home folder. At least this applies to Ubuntu. To do that,
$ echo 'PATH="$PATH:./node_modules/.bin"' >> ~/.profile
If your distro supports .bashrc and doesn't use .profile at all, run
$ echo 'export PATH="$PATH:./node_modules/.bin"' >> ~/.bashrc
The command above append the directory location to $PATH. You might find some instructions online use "./node_modules/.bin:$PATH", which prepend to $PATH. This makes node packages having precedence over /usr/bin(!). If a node package has malicious binaries with similar name as {% post_link unix-tools-line-endings 'Unix' %} {% post_link binaries-alpine-docker 'tools' %} like cd or ls, those will be executed instead of the ones in /usr/bin.
Method 2
This method is mostly used for CI runner, so probably you're not gonna use it. Anyway, here it goes.
Put it under script section of package.json. Usually it's above dependencies section. Assign a name for the command. You can include flags/arguments/options.
For example,
"scripts": {
"build": "hexo generate",
"test": "snyk auth $SNYK_TOKEN && snyk protect && snyk test && snyk monitor",
"postbuild": "renovate --token $BOT_TOKEN --platform 'gitlab' --onboarding false --update-lock-files false --labels 'renovate' --recreate-closed true curben/blog"
},
Running npm run test would execute snyk auth $SNYK_TOKEN && snyk protect && snyk test && snyk monitor.
So, back to the Hexo example, you could put its most common operations like hexo new post, hexo clean, hexo generate or hexo server into the "scripts" section, and then npm run [name].