Use NPM's .bin directory instead of globally installing dependencies

February 5, 2018

2 min read

Until recently, I thought that npm modules with a command line interface needed to be installed globally before they could be used. I found an article (in the sources) that talks about creating an npm run cli-app command instead of globally installing. This works because npm keeps a .bin directory in node_modules that it references cli based apps you have installed like gulp or grunt. This .bin directory is added to the path of all npm run commands so you can just directly create a npm run script like this:

. . .

"scripts": {
  "gulp": "gulp buildProject"
},

. . .

And then just call it from cli as npm run gulp. Now you have a versioned instance of gulp installed as a dev dependency just for this project instead of a global instance used across a variety of different projects.

#sources

https://codeburst.io/maybe-dont-globally-install-that-node-js-package-f1ea20f94a00