nsrun

A utility that will run npm scripts without all the logs from npm run-script.

USAGE

Install:
  npm install -g nsrun

Run a script defined in package.json:
  nsrun <script-name> <arguments-for-your-script>

List all the scripts defined in package.json:
  nsrun

FEATURES

• Steps right into the background and allows your script to take over. The only output you see is whatever the script itself outputs.

• Just like npm run-script, augments your $PATH with the binaries in ./node_modules/.bin/, so you can use mocha without worrying about installing it globally (for example).

• Passes arguments right through to your script (no need for --).

• Uses nsrun whenever it sees npm run-script or npm run in one of your script definitions.

• Uses $* and/or $1,$2,... wherever in your npm script definitions. The argument of a positional parameter is cleared from the list of arguments.

"coveralls": "npm run-script cover && cat ./coverage/lcov.info | coveralls && rm -rf ./coverage"
"publish-release": "npm version $1 && npm publish && git push origin $2 && npm run coveralls"
...
$ nsrun publish-release patch master

WHY?

I love npm's run-script feature. It feels right to put all the "scripts" that go along with your code in one simple place, right next to all the other metadata about your project, in package.json. Your scripts are expressed as shell scripts, nice and easy. (Want to learn more about why I prefer this over something like grunt or gulp as a script runner? Here is one justification that I agree with.)

There's a small problem with npm run-script though. When your script exits with a nonzero exit code, indicating that there was an error, you see lines and lines of copy written by npm basically saying "this error is probably because the script is bad, not because npm messed up... but in case npm did mess up, here's how you can most helpfully report a bug!"

Now, from npm's perspective this makes a lot of sense... I am sure they get a lot of bug reports from clueless users, especially when npm install x goes wrong or something. But in my use case, this output is often very frustrating. You see, I like to use npm run-script to run my tests (usually with the shorthand, npm test). If the test fails, the script will fail with a nonzero exit code. And npm then outputs all the boilerplate that we've been discussing.

But before all that boilerplate output is output from my script itself, including information about which test failed and why. And that's the information I really want to see.

I wrote this utility to replace npm run-script -- the only difference is that this one doesn't print out any output at all. In fact, it uses kexec to just become whatever process your script should be.

TESTING

npm install
nsrun test