Is package.json required for plugins to work?

[HenrikPoulsen]

I need to use the gitlab plugin.
So I tried installing it globally with npm i -g @semantic-release/gitlab before running npx semantic-release and it cannot find the plugin.

[semantic-release] » ✘  An error occurred while running semantic-release: Error: Cannot find module '@semantic-release/gitlab'

If I do install it with -D it generates a package.json file in the repo and then it can load the plugin just fine.

Since this is not an npm based repository I would prefer to not have a package.json file in the repo. Is there any way to get it to load the plugins without a package.json present?

[sheerlox]

npm install --no-save --prefix . @semantic-release/gitlab should do the trick 😉

[HenrikPoulsen]

Learned something new today. Thanks 🙂

[sheerlox]

Learned that yesterday, had to solve the same issue for Elixir projects 😅