README
NPM Git Install
Clones and (re)installs packages from remote git repos. It is meant as a temporary solution until npm/npm#3055 is resolved.
Install
npm install --save npm-git-install
Use
In your pacakge.json
add:
{
"scripts": {
"install": "npm-git-install"
}
"gitDependencies": {
"private-package-name": "git@private.git.server:user/repo.git#revision",
"public-package-name": "https://github.com/user/repo.git#revision"
}
}
Obviously replace *-package-name
and git URLs with values relevant to your project. URLs has to be in cannonical form (i.e. one that you would provide to git clone
on command line) - no fancy NPM shortcuts like "user/repo" or "bitbucket:user/repo". If you want this, I'm open for PR. Actually I started to implement this, but gave up - see messy-auto-discovery
branch.
Why
IMO there is a serious defect in current versions of NPM regarding installation process of dependencies from git repositories. It basically prevents us from installing anything that needs build from git repos, or forcing us to keep build artifacts in the repos. Here is relevant issue with ongoing discussion.
TL/DR:
If you npm install ../some-local-directory/my-package
then npm will run prepublish
script of the package-from-local-directory
and then install it in current project. This is fine.
One would expect that running npm install git@remote-git-server:me/my-package.git
would also run prepublish
before installing. Unfortunately it won't. Further more, it will apply .npmignore
, which will most likely remove all your source files and make it hard to recover. Boo...
How
From command line
npm-git-install
This simple script will git clone
anything it finds in gitDependencies
section of package.json
into temporary directory, run npm install
in this directory (which will trigger prepublish
) and then npm install <temporary directory>
in your project. In effect you will get your dependency properly installed.
You can optionally specify file different then package.json
, e.g.:
npm-git-install git-dependencies.json
You may want to do this if you find it offensive to put non-standard section in your package.json
.
Also try --help
for more options.
API
You can also use it programmatically. Just require npm-git-install
. It exposes three methods:
discover (path)
Reads list of packages from file at given path and returns array of
{url, revision}
objects. You can supply this toreinstall_all
method.reinstall_all (options, packages)
Executes
reinstall
in series for each package inpackages
. Options are also passed to eachreinstall
call.Returns a
Promise
.reinstall (oprions, package)
Clones the repo at
package.url
, checks outpackage.revisios
, runsnpm install
at cloned repos directory and installs the package from there.Options are:
silent
: Suppress child processes standard output. Boolean. Default isfalse
.verbose
: Print debug messages. Boolean. Default isfalse
.
Returns a
Promise
.You probably don't want to use it directly. Just call
reinstall_all
with relevant options.
If you are a Gulp user, then it should be easy enough to integrate it with your gulpfile.
dependencies
and devDependencies
Why not use I tried and it's hard, because NPM supports fancy things as Git URLs. See messy-auto-discovery
branch. You are welcome to take it from where I left. There is --all
CLI option reserved that should do that. It is currently not supported.
There is also another reason. User may not want to reinstall all Git dependencies this way. For example I use gulp version 4, which is only available from GitHub and it is perfectly fine to install it with standard NPM. I don't want to rebuild it on my machine every time I install it. Now I can leave it in devDependencies
and only use npm-git-install
for stuff that needs it.