Add locally installed module's binaries to $PATH

[jhermann]

"activate" should add "‹envdir›/node_modules/.bin" to the $PATH, in front of "‹envdir›/bin".

[ekalinin]

1. May by ‹envdir›/lib/node_modules/.bin (and not ‹envdir›/node_modules/.bin)?
2. Just checked:

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages env
$ . env/bin/activate
$ pip install nodeenv
$ nodeenv 4 -p --prebuilt
$ npm -g install sitemap
sitemap@0.7.3 ~/env/lib/node_modules/sitemap
$ ls -a env/lib/node_modules/
.  ..  npm  sitemap

There is no any .bin directory in the env/lib/node_modules/.
When this directory is to be created?
How can i check it?

[jhermann]

Try something that has a bin in its package.json, like gulp.

Also see https://www.npmjs.org/doc/package.json.html#bin

[LukeSkyw]

Same problem here for Karma. I add the package through npm, the package is installed in
env/lib/node_modules/karma
The binary is present but no link is created in env/bin so I can't use karma directly from the command line.
Is this a problem with karma package or with nodeenv ?

[chizcracker]

Check if your package is installed locally. If so, the binary will be in project_root/node_modules/package_name/bin
Simply, you can
export PATH=$NPM_CONFIG_PREFIX/../node_modules/.bin:$PATH
or rewrite activate script to include node_modules path to the $PATH.

If you don't like either, then install packages globally. Since your project is managed by nodeenv, installing global might be the easiest solution.
npm install -g package_name

[Jobava]

Hello, any progress on this issue?

How do people actually run nodeenv if the packages installed with npm are not in the PATH?

[bigsmoke]

With the current implementation, it is unpractical to use npm without -g. However, when installing packages from a project's package.json rather than a requirements file, npm -g also does not have the required result, because all the package dependencies from package.json will be installed below the package in virtualenv/lib/node_modules/<package_name>/node_modules. This comes down to being forced to put all your dependencies in a requirements file.

It would be extremely nice if packages installed through npm without -g (in project/node_modules/) would be in the $NODE_PATH and their binaries (in project/node_modules/.bin/) in the $PATH.

Any plans to making nodeenv modify virtual/bin/activate in such a way as to make this possible?

[jhermann]

A local install of gulp creates this, thus the original request:

$ ls -l ./node_modules/.bin/gulp
lrwxrwxrwx 1 jhe jhe 19 Jan 11 17:20 ./node_modules/.bin/gulp -> ../gulp/bin/gulp.js

Or well, DID create. In a more recently created virtualenv I get different results.

For gulp, the way to go is npm install -g gulp-cli – but I don't know if all relevant packages follow that pattern to offer a *-cli package.