npm-autoloader

This provides extensible autoloading scripts to customize npm's behavior in the context of a given package – for example, to support alternative formats for the package.json file. This is a more flexible alternative to using npm's onload-script configuration variable.

Install

It's highly recommended to install npm-autoloader globally (either systemwide or somewhere else your $NODE_PATH will find it), due to the implementation of onload-script. You also need to set the onload-script config variable to point to the installation, though the config setting can be local instead of global.

npm install npm-autoloader --global
npm config set onload-script npm-autoloader --global

If you don't want to (or can't) install npm-autoloader globally, you can instead list the full, absolute path to the dist/index.js file:

npm install npm-autoloader
npm config set onload-script `node -e 'console.log(require.resolve("npm-autoloader"))'`

Use

npm-autoloader will look for one of the following files in your project root directory and/or your global configuration directory (whichever directory holds the npmrc file that you can edit with npm config edit --global):

• npm-autoload.yaml
• npm-autoload.yml
• npm-autoload.json

This file should contain a list of autoload entries in either short or long format, containing the following options:

module (string, required) : the name of the module to load, in the same format expected by the require() function. Relative paths, which should start with . or .., as well as module resolution, behave as though the configuration file itself contained the require() statement.

func (string, optional) : the name of a function to call in the module. It will be passed an instance of the npm object, which can be queried for things like the command name. If the module exports a function called _npm_autoload, it will be used as a default when this is not specified.

required (boolean, optional) : whether this autoload entry must succeed for npm to be allowed to run. Ignored during initial npm install.

The short format is a string with the syntax [+]module[:func], where the required option is represented by a leading +.

During the initial npm install of a project (as determined by no existing node_modules/ directory and an npm install command line with no additional non-option arguments), npm-autoloader will silence any load errors from that project's npm-autoload.* configuration file and will not abort if the module was required, to allow for the initial dependency installation.

npm-autoload.yaml example

- package-yaml
- module: console
  func: log
  required: true
- +process:exit

npm-autoload.json example

[
    "package-yaml",
    {
        "module": "console",
        "func": "log",
        "required": true,
    },
    "+process:exit"
]

Environment variables

• $DEBUG_NPM_AUTOLOADER - if present, output various debugging info.
• $SKIP_NPM_AUTOLOADER - if present, do not do any autoload. Useful as SKIP_NPM_AUTOLOADER=1 npm install.