Discussion on: What interesting things I can do with npm?

[ItsASine (Kayla)]

I abuse the heck out of npm scripts. They aren't just for build, serve, and test!

For instance, as a SQA, I need to have packages like Jasmine and Protractor, and then use Protractor to kick off my tests and maintain my selenium package.

So in my package.json, I include in scripts:

  "scripts": {
    // snip
    "update-webdriver": "node node_modules/protractor/node_modules/webdriver-manager/bin/webdriver-manager update",
    "preprotractor": "npm run update-webdriver",
    "protractor": "node node_modules/protractor/bin/protractor path/to/conf/file",
    // snip
  }

So what happens when I run npm run protractor is:

1. I get the latest selenium jar and chromedriver (and other drivers I don't care about like gecko but whatever)
2. The local installation of protractor kicks off a test run with the default suite.

Things this buys me:

1. Every single guide on protractor starts with npm i -g protractor. NO. Bad. I don't want every onboarding to be a laundry list of global packages to install. Just use project dev-dependencies and scripts that alias the unweildy bin paths. Now everyone's computers can be happy cookie cutters without needing local aliasing and global installs.
2. Since scripts has a concept of pre and post runs, I can ensure everyone actually keeps chromedriver up to date with Chrome without having to keep tabs on that. It just works
3. I can still override or include settings at runtime like npm run protractor -- --suite=api rather than always using the default.

I'm half tempted to put in a postprotractor for running npm run eslint -- --fix e2e-tests/** but I might hear complaints if I do that...

But I do this set up on every project I'm on to keep things nice and tidy.

[Tim Ermilov]

Worth noting that you don't need to write node node_modules/.bin/protractor config - you can just use protractor config and npm will figure out the rest for you :)

[ItsASine (Kayla)]

Nifty! I'll try to remember that next time.