CODEWITHSUNDEEP
node.jsbashrestautomationnpm
Agile Automation
Agile Automation

Reputation: 41

Package and distribute Bash script with NPM to allow installation globally into developer workstation's paths with npm install

I have some scripts that I want to distribute with npm for developers to be able to install globally on their workstations and then use the commands of the scripts on their computers in their development workflow.

I can't work out how to get npm to actually add the script in its package to the path though.

I see that the firebase tools have this in their package.json:

  "preferGlobal": true,
  "bin": {
    "firebase": "./bin/firebase"
  },

...but I can't quite work out how this relates to my project.

The first project I am trying to distribute with npm is for controlling a Belkin WeMo light switch, it includes an executable 'wemo' and an included functions.inc.sh file, this can be seen @ https://github.com/agilemation/Belkin-WeMo-Command-Line-Tools.git

If anyone can point me in the right direction it will be really appreciated!!!

Thanks,

James

Upvotes: 2

Views: 872

Answers (1)

tkone
tkone

Reputation: 22758

Any key/value pairs placed into the bin key of the package.json will be symlink'ed into the NPM bin-dir path.

The key is what you want the command to be named and the value part is the script in your package it should run.

Ergo, in your example, when npm install finishes running it'll create a symlink from [package-install-path]/bin/firebase to /usr/local/bin/firebase (or whatever bin directory prefix NPM is using (npm bin -g will tell you where this is).

If you only have one script you can also do:

{
  "name": "my-awesome-package",
  "bin": "./myscript.sh"
}

And it'll symlink myscript.sh to my-awesome-package

Although you should be wary of including bash scripts since they won't work on Windows.

Here are the docs for this.

Upvotes: 4

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