npxc

npxc

NPX Closest - Small, dependency free, ES5 native NodeJS way of executing the closest npm binary from current working directory and upwards.

Using eslint with the airbnb-base/legacy config for the code and airbnb-base for tests, is tested using AVA.

When to use

My team encountered problems with using npm bins from parent folders in monoreps (i.e. a repo utilising lerna). We wanted to use tools such as eslint and rollup installed in the root of the monorepo, but utilise them inside the packages of the the monorepo, so packages/project1/package.json would have content something like this:

"scripts": {
  "build": "../../node_modules/rollup/bin/rollup -c ../../rollup.config.js --environment BUILD:production"
}

This was confusing and created issues on different platforms where some terminals did not recognize .. as a command, etc, so I decided to try a different approach, which resulted in that you could replace the above line with the following:

"scripts": {
  "build": "npxc rollup -c ../../rollup.config.js --environment BUILD:production"
}

Usage

In your monorepo, install shared libraries in the root package.json, then in the packages/project1/ use npm install npxc --save-dev to use npxc in that project. In packages/project1/package.json, use npxc like this:

"scripts": {
  "build": "npxc my-shared-bin --my-args"
}

If it does not find my-shared-bin in node_modules for packages/project1, it'll traverse upwards, and hit ../../node_modules/.bin/my-shared-bin, fire that with the current working directory correctly and the right arguments (hopefully, if I didn't do anything wrong).

It defaults to a depth of 5, so max ['./', '../', '../../', '../../', '../../../'].