support optional global require for non-js filetypes

[doublerebel]

Hello,

Would you consider an option for Liftoff that allows global require of CoffeeScript, etc., rather than limiting to requireLocal?

In some cases I write a Hacker.coffee as a utility script for a package in another language, so having a locally installed interpreter seems like overkill. I think most users who would write a script in <js-variant> likely already rely on having a globally installed interpreter for utility purposes like REPL.

Thanks for your work!

Charles

EDIT: FWIW, npm recommends that modules called from the CLI prefer global installation, CoffeeScript has set preferGlobal: true as of 1.8.0.

[tkellen]

Hey Charles! Unfortunately (or, fortunately, depending on your perspective), node does not natively allow what you are describing. Please see the "global module semantics" section of this blog post: http://bocoup.com/weblog/building-command-line-tools-in-node-with-liftoff/.

That said, you could make this work by overriding requireLocal in your own code to manually look in the global node_modules directory for the requested module. I won't support that directly here though.

[doublerebel]

Well, I understand npm has a strong opinion on global require, but nevertheless it's still a feature available in node. I have my NODE_PATH set to take advantage of the feature. I haven't encountered another package that overrides native require to only requireLocal -- is there another reason for that?

[tkellen]

Fair point. While I would never personally use it, I would be down with a PR adding a configuration option to specify which folders should be used when looking for auto-loaded dependencies.

[tkellen]

Closing for inactivity. I would still accept a PR for this, though.

[Meroje]

I had a look at this, would the solution I just commited here be okay for a PR or is there some issues with require.paths (per the comment "Probably don't use this") ?

[heikki]

FYI that fix breaks if process.env.NODE_PATH is undefined.

Nvm has stopped setting it: https://github.com/creationix/nvm/issues/586

[Meroje]

Ah right, I was testing with gulp which wraps this in a try/catch. A simple condition will do for this. Any insight on this comment on node-resolve : "opts.paths: probably don't use this" ?

[heikki]

I've seen that too but don't know any additional details.

Here's related PR that was rejected: https://github.com/substack/node-resolve/pull/47

[Meroje]

So, as I understand it, use of NODE_PATH is discouraged just like having a very long PATH and putting a binary in the last folder will be slow. I will submit the PR later once I have a test written.