README
npm-autoloader
This provides extensible autoloading scripts to customize npm
's behavior in the context of a given package – for example, to support alternative formats for the package.json
file. This is a more flexible alternative to using npm
's onload-script
configuration variable.
Install
It's highly recommended to install npm-autoloader
globally (either systemwide or somewhere else your $NODE_PATH
will find it), due to the implementation of onload-script
. You also need to set the onload-script
config variable to point to the installation, though the config setting can be local instead of global.
npm install npm-autoloader --global
npm config set onload-script npm-autoloader --global
If you don't want to (or can't) install npm-autoloader
globally, you can instead list the full, absolute path to the dist/index.js
file:
npm install npm-autoloader
npm config set onload-script `node -e 'console.log(require.resolve("npm-autoloader"))'`
Use
npm-autoloader
will look for one of the following files in your project root directory and/or your global configuration directory (whichever directory holds the npmrc
file that you can edit with npm config edit --global
):
npm-autoload.yaml
npm-autoload.yml
npm-autoload.json
This file should contain a list of autoload entries in either short or long format, containing the following options:
module (string, required)
: the name of the module to load, in the same format expected by the require()
function. Relative paths, which should start with .
or ..
, as well as module resolution, behave as though the configuration file itself contained the require()
statement.
func (string, optional)
: the name of a function to call in the module. It will be passed an instance of the npm
object, which can be queried for things like the command name. If the module exports a function called _npm_autoload
, it will be used as a default when this is not specified.
required (boolean, optional)
: whether this autoload entry must succeed for npm
to be allowed to run. Ignored during initial npm install
.
The short format is a string with the syntax [+]module[:func]
, where the required option is represented by a leading +
.
During the initial npm install
of a project (as determined by no existing node_modules/
directory and an npm install
command line with no additional non-option arguments), npm-autoloader
will silence any load errors from that project's npm-autoload.*
configuration file and will not abort if the module was required, to allow for the initial dependency installation.
example npm-autoload.yaml
- package-yaml
- module: console
func: log
required: true
- +process:exit
example npm-autoload.json
[
"package-yaml",
{
"module": "console",
"func": "log",
"required": true,
},
"+process:exit"
]
Environment variables
$DEBUG_NPM_AUTOLOADER
- if present, output various debugging info.$SKIP_NPM_AUTOLOADER
- if present, do not do any autoload. Useful asSKIP_NPM_AUTOLOADER=1 npm install
.