lpx Local Package eXecute

Execute a command found in local node_modules/.bin folder or from a parent folder.

You can use lpx to

• run a binary found in the local node_modules/.bin folder
• run a binary found in the node_modules/.bin of a workspace root from anywhere in the workspace
• run a binary found in the node_modules/.bin of any parent folder

lpx does not download any package if the binary is not found locally (ie not like npx)

Install

This package must be installed globally

npm install -g lpx

Usage

With this folder structure :

folder1
|- node_modules
|- |- .bin
|- |- |- command1
|- other files in folder1
|- folder2
|- |- node_modules
|- |- |- .bin
|- |- |- |- command2
|- |- folder3

You can execute both command1 and command2 from folder3

cd folder1/folder2/folder3
lpx command1 command1arguments
lpx command2 command2arguments

Real life usage

If you have installed typescript in a local package and want to build your typescript project and its referenced projects in watch mode from the command line you can run lpx tsc -b -w

Exit code

The exit code of the executed command is propagated (ie if command exits with 99 error code, lpx command will exit with 99 as well)

Motivations

At Cervval, our packages are organised in a workspace that has a package.json that determines the versions of the build tools we use (tsc, webpack...)

I wanted to be able to use the binaries of these packages from the command line from anywhere in the workspace.

Solutions I tried before :

• Add scripts in each local package.json

Let's say you have scripts : { "tsc" : "tsc" } in your package.json

When doing this, you can run npm run tsc to use local tsc bin

If you want to add a parameter you need to run npm run tsc -- -b with -- which I find very unpleasant

Also, you have to put the binaries in all packages scripts which is not optimal

• npx

By using npx, if you are in a workspace sub folder it will download the package from npm registry and not use the locally defined one