New Note: You probably don’t want or need to do this. What you probably want to do is just put those types of command dependencies for build/test etc. in the devDependencies
section of your package.json. Anytime you use something from scripts
in package.json your devDependencies commands (in node_modules/.bin) act as if they are in your path.
For example:
npm i --save-dev mocha # Install test runner locally
npm i --save-dev babel # Install current babel locally
Then in package.json:
// devDependencies has mocha and babel now
"scripts": {
"test": "mocha",
"build": "babel -d lib src",
"prepublish": "babel -d lib src"
}
Then at your command prompt you can run:
npm run build # finds babel
npm test # finds mocha
npm publish # will run babel first
New NEW Note: For awhile now we have had npx
, which allows you to run the devDependencies commands without needing to add them to your scripts
section (if you want).
For example:
npx webpack
But if you really want to install globally, you can add a preinstall in the scripts section of the package.json:
"scripts": {
"preinstall": "npm i -g themodule"
}
So actually my npm install executes npm install again .. which is weird but seems to work.
Note: you might have issues if you are using the most common setup for npm
where global Node package installs required sudo
. One option is to change your npm
configuration so this isn’t necessary:
npm config set prefix ~/npm
, add $HOME/npm/bin to $PATH by appending export PATH=$HOME/npm/bin:$PATH
to your ~/.bashrc
.
Another, probably better option is to just use nvm
to manage Node and you won’t have that problem.