Re: Software distributed via npm?

[Jonathan Perkin <jperkin%pkgsrc.org@localhost>]

* On 2026-04-12 at 16:57 BST, Thomas Klausner wrote:

> On Sun, Apr 12, 2026 at 03:42:29PM +0100, Benny Siegert wrote:
> > I am using a few command-line tools that are meant to be installed with "npm
> > install". If I use "npm install -g", the tool is installed into
> > /usr/pkg/bin, without being tracked by the pkgsrc infrastructure. This seems
> > bad.
>
> This is much more complicated, because npm likes to install all the
> dependencies for a package for each package.
>
> Take a look at wip/prettier for a working npm package.
>
> I didn't take this further because many packages directly or
> indirectly depend on non-portable software that needs to be compiled,
> and since every npm package pulls in its own copy, the patches for
> this need to be distributed all over.
>
> It would be nice to have an npm that installs into a common prefix and
> all packages using a dependency could use it from there, but that is
> just not the npm that exists.

There are other issues, 'npm install -g' is just broken out of the box 
(plenty of bug reports over the last decade with bad interaction between 
sudo and EPERM), and you also have the problem that a lot of 
npm-installed software likes to automatically update itself, and that 
would break pkgsrc checksums.

FWIW you'll have a much nicer experience if you

  $ npm config set prefix=~/.local/npm

and then 'npm install -g' will actually work.  Add ~/.local/npm/bin to 
$PATH.

--
Jonathan Perkin                    pkgsrc.smartos.org
Open Source Complete Cloud   www.tritondatacenter.com