Executables in npm?
NPM is not just for distributing Node.js modules.
An NPM package can contain arbitrary stuff.
For example, NPM can be used to distribute executables.
NPM even has a few features to help with this use-case.
Let’s take a look.
Download the tarball for the rollup package
and look inside:
$ wget https://registry.npmjs.org/rollup/-/rollup-2.28.2.tgz
$ tar -ztvf rollup-2.28.2.tgz
-rwxr-xr-x 0 0 0 71182 26 Oct 1985 package/dist/bin/rollup
-rw-r--r-- 0 0 0 167272 26 Oct 1985 package/dist/shared/index.js
-rw-r--r-- 0 0 0 524 26 Oct 1985 package/dist/loadConfigFile.js
...
The file at package/dist/bin/rollup has its executable bit set.
When you run npm install rollup,
this all gets copied into node_modules,
and you can run the executable:
$ ls -l node_modules/rollup/dist/bin/rollup
-rwxr-xr-x 1 jim staff 71182 26 Oct 1985 node_modules/rollup/dist/bin/rollup
~/dev/tmp/rollup_hw
$ ./node_modules/rollup/dist/bin/rollup
rollup version 2.28.2
=====================================
Usage: rollup [options] <entry file>
...
Naturally enough, this executable is a node script,
though it could be anything:
$ head -1 node_modules/rollup/dist/bin/rollup
However, it’s not recommended to run the script directly via this path.
When you npm install rollup,
it also creates the symlink node_modules/.bin/rollup:
$ ls -ahl node_modules/.bin/rollup
lrwxr-xr-x 1 jim staff 25B 30 Sep 11:35 node_modules/.bin/rollup -> ../rollup/dist/bin/rollup
This is created not because of the executable bit on the file,
but because rollup’s package.json has this config:
{
"bin": {
"rollup": "dist/bin/rollup"
}
}
But it’s not really recommended to run ./node_modules/.bin/rollup directly, either.
One option is npm install rollup --global, followed by just running rollup.
This method is recommended by the rollup docs, but it’s not very nice.
It assumes that npm install --global puts the rollup executable on the $PATH
(on my machine, this happens to work because nvm sets this up).
It pollutes your $PATH.
And it makes you forget to specify your dependencies in your package.json.
A more reliable method is npm run-script (or npm run).
This reads commands from your local package.json,
and runs them with node_modules/.bin added to the PATH.
For example, if we add this to our local package.json:
{
"scripts": {
"build": "rollup main.mjs --file bundle.js"
}
}
Then we can run npm run-script build,
which effectively runs ./node_modules/.bin/rollup main.mjs --file bundle.js.
If you want to run this as a one-off command
instead of saving it to your scripts,
you can run npx -c 'rollup main.mjs --file bundle.js'.
Even more lazily, you can run npx foo bar baz,
but this has quite a bit of magic.
First it looks for foo on the path, e.g. npx ssh-keygen bar baz will just run ssh-keygen bar baz.
Failing that, it looks for ./node_modules/.bin/foo.
If that doesn’t exist, it will try to install the package foo (to a secret cache!),
and then “will try to guess the name of the binary to invoke”.
IMO, this is pretty dodgy behavior.
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