Change working directory for npm scripts

Question

Q: Is it possible to change the the context in which npm runs scripts?

What I want to is the following:

Answer 1

As noted above:

npm is probably using

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn

which would allow you to set options like:

    {cwd: pwd + 'somepath'}

but isn't exposing it.

I've solved it with a fairly large install.js, which does roughly that and it gets called from package.json like above. The API of child_process isn't that easy to handle, though, since it throws loads of hard to debug errors. Took me some time, but I am happy now.

Answer 2

npm allows only to do cd dir && command -args, which will also run on Windows.

A change to use node's spawn functionality has been made in PR https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/10958, but was rejected, due to the above solution.