How to use executables from a package installed locally in node_modules?

Question

How do I use a local version of a module in node.js. For example, in my app, I installed coffee-script:

npm install coffee-script

Answer 1

If you want to keep npm, then npx should do what you need.

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If switching to yarn (a npm replacement by facebook) is an option for you, then you can call:

 yarn yourCmd

scripts inside the package.json will take precedence, if none is found it will look inside the ./node_modules/.bin/ folder.

It also outputs what it ran:

$ yarn tsc
yarn tsc v0.27.5
$ "/home/philipp/rate-pipeline/node_modules/.bin/tsc"

So you don't have to setup scripts for each command in your package.json.

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If you had a script defined at .scripts inside your package.json:

"tsc": "tsc" // each command defined in the scripts will be executed from `./node_modules/.bin/` first

yarn tsc would be equivalent to yarn run tsc or npm run tsc:

 yarn tsc
 yarn tsc v0.27.5
 $ tsc