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zkat / npx

execute npm package binaries (moved)
https://github.com/npm/npx
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Feature request: --script #107

Closed ljharb closed 7 years ago

ljharb commented 7 years ago

Essentially, I'd like to be able to do npx --script=foo, and have it do the same thing as npm run foo, but much faster since it wouldn't have to bootstrap all of npm :-)

The way I envision it working is that it would read "scripts.foo" from package.json, use the contents as the -c, and then proceed normally from there. -p, and the other options, would continue to work as expected. --script would of course have to be mutually exclusive with -c.

Theoretically, npm run x could even proxy out directly to npx --script=x, lightening up npm itself :-D

I tried to take a crack at building it, but it's probably better to start with the issue and get some pointers if you think this is a good idea.

zkat commented 7 years ago

I don't really feel like there's much of a point in this feature: npm run <script> does this job well enough, for one. If you want -p, you can still do $ npx -p <pkg> npm run foo, too.

Performance won't really be any different here, either: when using the -c option, npx actually executes an extra npm child process to fetch all the necessary configurations to emulate run-scripts properly. In the end, this method would be much slower than a plain npm run call.

ljharb commented 7 years ago

Gotcha - the two main benefits I can think of are performance, and that node installations that lack an npm entirely could still run scripts - the latter has been a concern of node core, but isn't mine; and it sounds like the former wouldn't work out. Thanks for the reply!

zkat commented 7 years ago

@ljharb There's work going on right now to extract the lifecycle script subsystem out of npm and put it in a standalone library. Keep an eye on https://github.com/npm/lifecycle.