resolve-package

Resolves a given package if it is installed locally, then tries to resolve it from global registry, using battle-tested global-modules package. Better approach than internal require.resolve, so you can trust. You just get absolute filepath to some package - path to its entry point, its main export

You might also be interested in always-done.

Table of Contents

• Background
  • Why
  • Resolution
• Install
• Usage
• API
  • resolvePackage
• Related
• Contributing
• Building docs
• Running tests
• Author
• License

(TOC generated by verb using markdown-toc)

Background

Why

Because I love hybrids - hybrid thinking. And here with "hybrid" I mean that we need sane resolver. You give a package name and if it is not installed locally to be able to get it if it is installed globally. So that's what this package does - first tries to resolve it from locally installed modules, then if it's not found will load it from global.

That's useful and cool for command line interfaces, generators, scaffolders and etc stuff. There is one bad example - gulp, especially gulp3. I don't know, but for me it is weird to install same package both globally and locally. And Gulp is not the only one where I found this - this thinking and implementation. Two years or more I thinking why this is in that way.

Good example, where resolving is correctly done is generate / base / verb. There if you have some generator installed globally, you can use it through CLI, but if it is installed locally you, again, can use it - Generate is smart enough and the Base ecosystem is robust enough. Internally, somewhere (not sure enough yet), in Generate - actually somewhere in Base plugins, exactly the same thing is done. So I believe we can integrate this package there successfuly.

The resolve-pkg does not do that thing, resolve-module too, resolve and resolve-from too. So... that's why.

I built these 3-4 packages before ~2 years. I'm talking for detect-installed, get-installed-path and is-installed. They was not finished totally until now and there was few bugs.

Just to be clear: this package returns you a full absolute path to given package - the main export (the entry point or whatever you calling it) to the given package. Actual path that you can directly require in later step, that's all about.

Resolution

So how we resolve given package?

First, we pass the name directly to get-installed-path and pass local: true to get the folder of that package from locally installed modules if exists.

Then we tries to read the package.json in that directory.

1) If it exists we do 3 things (using path.resolve):

• if options.mainFile is given we join it with the folder of the package;
• if options.mainField is given we get the value of that field from that package.json file and join it with the folder of the package;
• or as last fallback if no options are given we use the value of main field in that package.json file.

2) If there's no package.json file in that directory we simply check if options.mainFile is given and join it with the directory of the package. If not given we fallback to use index.js.

Second, if given package is not installed locally we repeat the same process but we pass local: false to get-install-path, so it will check global registry of modules, based on global-prefix and global-modules. They are the best out there and works even on Windows machines, hence the green AppVeyor badges are all around mentioned packages.

If it is not clear enough with that words, feel free to open an issue to discuss it, look at tryLoad function in the source code or review the tests.

Install

Install with npm

$ npm install resolve-package --save

or install using yarn

$ yarn add resolve-package

Usage

For more use-cases see the tests

const resolvePackage = require('resolve-package')

API

resolvePackage

Get full absolute path of package with name from local node_modules or from globally installed.

Params

• name {String}: package name
• opts {Function}: optional options such as below
• opts.cwd {String}: directory where is the node_modules folder
• opts.mainFile {String}: main file for directories, default index.js
• opts.mainField {String}: name of the package.json's "main" field, default main
• returns {Promise}

Example

const resolvePackage = require('resolve-package')

resolvePackage('npm').then((fp) => {
  console.log(fp)
  // => '~/.nvm/versions/node/v7.0.0/lib/node_modules/npm/lib/npm.js'
})

resolvePackage('standard').then((fp) => {
  console.log(fp)
  // => '~/.nvm/versions/node/v7.0.0/lib/node_modules/standard/index.js'
})

resolvePackage('get-installed-path').then((fp) => {
  console.log(fp)
  // => '~/code/resolve-package/node_modules/get-installed-path/index.js'
})

resolvePackage('foo-quqixs-dasdasdh').catch((err) => {
  console.error(err) // => Error module not found
})

Related

• always-done: Handle completion and errors with elegance! Support for streams, callbacks, promises, child processes, async/await and sync functions. A drop-in replacement… more | homepage
• detect-installed: Checks that given package is installed globally or locally. | homepage
• each-promise: Iterate over promises, promise-returning or async/await functions in series or parallel. Support settle (fail-fast), concurrency (limiting) and hooks system (start… more | homepage
• get-installed-path: Get locally or globally installation path of given package name | homepage
• global-modules: The directory used by npm for globally installed npm modules. | homepage
• global-paths: Returns an array of unique "global" directories based on the user's platform and environment. The resulting paths can be used… more | [homepage](https://github.com/jonschlinkert/global-paths "Returns an array of unique "global" directories based on the user's platform and environment. The resulting paths can be used for doing lookups for generators or other globally installed npm packages. Node.js / JavaScript.")
• global-prefix: Get the npm global path prefix. | homepage
• is-installed: Checks that given package is installed on the system - globally or locally. | homepage
• minibase: Minimalist alternative for Base. Build complex APIs with small units called plugins. Works well with most of the already existing… more | homepage
• mukla: Small, parallel and fast test framework with suppport for async/await, promises, callbacks, streams and observables. Targets and works at node.js… more | homepage
• try-catch-core: Low-level package to handle completion and errors of sync or asynchronous functions, using once and dezalgo libs. Useful for and… more | homepage

Contributing

Pull requests and stars are always welcome. For bugs and feature requests, please create an issue.
Please read the contributing guidelines for advice on opening issues, pull requests, and coding standards.
If you need some help and can spent some cash, feel free to contact me at CodeMentor.io too.

In short: If you want to contribute to that project, please follow these things

1. Please DO NOT edit README.md, CHANGELOG.md and .verb.md files. See "Building docs" section.
2. Ensure anything is okey by installing the dependencies and run the tests. See "Running tests" section.
3. Always use npm run commit to commit changes instead of git commit, because it is interactive and user-friendly. It uses commitizen behind the scenes, which follows Conventional Changelog idealogy.
4. Do NOT bump the version in package.json. For that we use npm run release, which is standard-version and follows Conventional Changelog idealogy.

Thanks a lot! 😃

Building docs

Documentation and that readme is generated using verb-generate-readme, which is a verb generator, so you need to install both of them and then run verb command like that

$ npm install verbose/verb#dev verb-generate-readme --global && verb

Please don't edit the README directly. Any changes to the readme must be made in .verb.md.

Running tests

Clone repository and run the following in that cloned directory

$ npm install && npm test

Author

Charlike Mike Reagent

• github/tunnckoCore
• twitter/tunnckoCore
• codementor/tunnckoCore

License

Copyright © 2016, Charlike Mike Reagent. Released under the MIT license.

This file was generated by verb-generate-readme, v0.2.0, on December 14, 2016.
Project scaffolded using charlike cli.