CODEWITHSUNDEEP
meteornpm
Noland
Noland

Reputation: 740

How to install NPM package from GitHub for Meteor?

I have forked an npm package on GitHub, made changes to it, and now want to install the package in my Meteor app directly from GitHub.

My package.json looks like so:

{
  "dependencies": {    
    "semantic-ui-react": "git+https://git@github.com/nolandg/Semantic-UI-React.git",
  }
}

I then run

meteor npm install

Which appears to work fine and tells me it's installed the package:

semantic-ui-react@0.61.6  (git+https://git@github.com/nolandg/Semantic-UI-React.git#f27d5c736e5de1eed0acf7769f18caee57578526)

And indeed the package appears in the node_modules folder. But when I try to start my Meteor app, I get this error:

Cannot set property '/my-website/node_modules/semantic-ui-react/package.json' of undefined

at Resolver._resolvePkgJsonMain (/tools/isobuild/resolver.js:320:9)

Has anyone successfully install an npm package in a Meteor app directly from GitHub? I can't figure this one out. Thanks!

Meteor version: 1.4.2.3

Upvotes: 5

Views: 908

Answers (3)

none
none

Reputation: 1817

Why do you not use simple command?

  meteor npm install https://github.com/nolandg/Semantic-UI-React.git

I did:

  meteor create test
  cd test
  meteor npm install
  meteor add react react-dom
  meteor npm install https://github.com/nolandg/Semantic-UI-React.git
  meteor

And no errors (-:

Upvotes: 0

kkkkkkk
kkkkkkk

Reputation: 7748

The main reason why the package does not work when fetching from git is because it is not configured to work that way. This is not a Meteor specific problem, but a problem that a JS developer may face sometimes.

For this particular case there are two problems:

  • The whitelist files field in package.json only contains src and dist folder. That means when you fetch it by npm almost all config files needed to build the code are gone.
  • Code for this package requies to be built in order to work with your code. This is done when the author publish it to npm, but you fetch it directly from github so this step is undone.

Because you already folked and modified the package, so let modify the package.json as below (remove all the comments I added them to give you some explanation), push it to github, and fetch it again by npm:

// remove the "files" field
// ...
"scripts": {
  // this script is used to build the package
  "postinstall": "postinstall-build dist \"npm run build:commonjs\""
  // ...
},
"dependencies": {
  // this helps build the package
  "postinstall-build": "^2.1.3"
},
// ...

Upvotes: 3

Mikkel
Mikkel

Reputation: 7777

Packages are not usually installed from github, they are published, which means that many versions of a package are available, you can choose which one you get. I'm not sure if what you are doing is possible, but it's certainly inadvisable.

If you want to make changes to a github package, you can download the it to your local machine and do npm link, so that it uses your local package instead of the one on npm. Read more about it at https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/link

Upvotes: 0

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