How can NPM run a command that isn't in path

Question

The ava command is not in my path. I can not run it from in the project directory that contains some AVA tests.

My npm test command of my project is set to ava tests/*.js --verbose, and can somehow call the ava command from the same location in the terminal.

My questions is: how is npm calling the ava command? I suspect it is calling it from the project's node_modules folder, but I could not find it in any source.

If anyone can explain how this happens, or better yet show me the source, I would really appreciate it.

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 31 '18 at 16:56

2

When you run the npm run [script] or in this case npm test, NPM is smart enough to try to execute the binary from the node_modules/.bin directory first.

edited May 31 '18 at 16:56

tehp

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answered May 30 '18 at 23:31

Felix Fong

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You say first, does that mean that there may not be an executable in `.bin` for some reason? Where would it look if it wasn't there? – tehp May 30 '18 at 23:35
I think it will then start looking into the packages you installed globally – Felix Fong May 30 '18 at 23:43
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Recent npm releases come with https://github.com/zkat/npx, so you can do `npx ava`. – Mark Wubben May 31 '18 at 16:37

How can NPM run a command that isn't in path

1 Answers1