preferGlobal is broken :/

[RilDev]

Good day,

I recently added "preferGlobal": true to my package.json but it doesn't add the -g flag in the suggested installation snippet on NPM.

I found this Stack-Overflow answer talking about this issue 5 years ago: https://stackoverflow.com/a/28206992

Is there any plan to fix this?

Cordially,
RilDev

[ljharb]

Generally speaking, that flag, along with installing anything globally, is discouraged by the ecosystem. It’s not really something you can know with authority that your consumers want to install your package globally - they might have it as a dep or a dev dep, and run it vis an npm run-script, or they might be running it via npx.

[ljharb]

https://2ality.com/2016/01/locally-installed-npm-executables.html

[RilDev]

Thank you for taking the time to clarify this one for me! I did some testing and I get it now.

For reference:

• npm i -g gh-packages will give use access to the gh-packages cli on the whole system.
• npx gh-packages [custom options] to run the package without having to install it.
• npm i gh-packages or npm i -D gh-packages will enable us to create a script in package.json like so:

"scripts": {
  "package": "gh-packages [custom options]"
}

This script can be used with npm run package or npm run package -- [additional custom options].

[MylesBorins]

Small life hack.

If you add export PATH="$PATH:node_modules/.bin" to your .bash_profile (or equivalent) then you can use all the binaries installed by dependencies in the root of a project.

https://github.com/MylesBorins/dot-files/blob/main/.bash_profile#L10-L11

*note:

It is important to append it to your path (add to the end) rather than prepend (add to beginning) to ensure that npm installed dependencies won't shadow local binaries

[ruyadorno]

to build on top of @MylesBorins comment, in npm@7.1.0 we just added a new interactive subshell that will also enable this workflow (for the duration of that subshell session, so Myles' life hack is still very relevant if you want to always have binaries available) without the need of tweaking your .bashrc file 😊

Running npm exec (with no args) will now open a new subshell with node_modules/.bin appended to your $PATH so that you can run all binaries you regularly can with npm run from an interactive shell 😄 give it a try:

npm install -g npm@7

[RilDev]

Thank you @MylesBorins! That little hack makes the npm local install work like I expected it to work by default:

npm i -D [package-name] # To install package locally as a DevDependency
[package-name] # To run the locally installed package

@ruyadorno, I tried to use npm exec for a while but I couldn't make it work with nvm. I tried to reinstall nvm and several ways to fix the error like unset PREFIX and https://stackoverflow.com/a/47861348/12818567 with closing/reopening my terminal but unsuccessfully :/
Is there anything I missed?
I the meanwhile I opened an issue on nvm: nvm-sh/nvm#2379

Have a nice day!