blai / require-linked-peer

`require` for plugins of global npm tools such as gulp/grunt.

#require-linked-peer

Require from a module installed through npm link, for a module as peer dependency.

Those who are developing plugins for tools like grunt and gulp knows the pain when you try to link your local plugin module into your testing project.

I have tried [node-parent-require](https://github.com/jaredhanson/node-parent-require), which is trying to solve this problem for frameworks like mongoose. But it didn't seem to solve the problem well for things like gulp, which also has a copy of the module living under the global node_modules.

The scenario

Say I want to organize a set of gulp tasks in a npm module so I can reuse them for a number of projects that shares the same technologies/conventions/structures. So I have this:

/reusable-gulp-tasks
├── tasks
│   ├── build.js
│   ├── clean.js
│   ├── serve.js
│   └── watch.js
└── package.json

and my tasks/build.js may look something like this:

var gulp = require('gulp');

gulp.task('build', function () {
  ...
});

Now let's say I use my yeoman generator to scaffold a new project, which looks like this:

/my-next-big-project
├── gulpfile.json
└── package.json

with gulpfile.json looking like this:

var gulp = require('gulp');

gulp.task('buildAndMore', ['build'], function () {
  // do something
  ...
});

and the package.json:

{
  ...
  devDependencies: {
    "gulp": "^3.8.0",
    "reusable-gulp-tasks": "latest"
  }
}

Imagine if I used npm link reusable-gulp-tasks to bring a local copy of my package into my-next-big-project's child modules list. Then I would run into error: when I do gulp buildAndMore, the gulp cli would complain about the build task didn't exist. In a typical setup, this is because your reusable-gulp-tasks would resolve gulp from the global node_modules (where the gulp cli is installed), and your my-next-big-project/gulpfile.json would resolve gulp from the local node_modules.

To make this work, I used this require-linked-peer module.

Usage

Install the module with: npm install require-linked-peer.

Then in your plugin (e.g. reusable-gulp-tasks in the above example)

var requirePeer = require('require-linked-peer');
var gulp = requireLink('gulp');

License

Copyright (c) 2014
Licensed under the MIT license.