I would like to create a package.json
build script that executes slightly different set of commands when run from Windows, Linux, Mac.
The problem is that I cannot find a way to put it in package.json
file that will run without problems at every system.
Here is an example that I would like to have:
"scripts" : {
"build.windows" : "echo do windows specific stuff",
"build.linux" : "echo do linux specific stuff",
"build.mac" : "echo do mac specific stuff",
"build" : "??????????????" <- what to put here to execute script designed for OS
on which npm is running
}
You can use scripts with node run-script command. npm run
is a shortcut of it.
Package json:
"scripts" : {
"build-windows" : "node build-windows.js",
"build-linux" : "node build-linux.js",
"build-mac" : "node build-mac.js",
"build" : "node build.js"
}
Command line:
npm run build-windows
If you don't like it, you can use commands inside node.js.
Package json:
"scripts" : {
"build" : "node build.js"
}
Build.js
var sys = require('sys')
var exec = require('child_process').exec;
function puts(error, stdout, stderr) { sys.puts(stdout) }
var os = require('os');
//control OS
//then run command depengin on the OS
if (os.type() === 'Linux')
exec("node build-linux.js", puts);
else if (os.type() === 'Darwin')
exec("node build-mac.js", puts);
else if (os.type() === 'Windows_NT')
exec("node build-windows.js", puts);
else
throw new Error("Unsupported OS found: " + os.type());
There's an NPM package called run-script-os
( NPM | GitHub ) that doesn't require you to write any additional files, and this can be convenient if what you're trying to do is very simple. For example, in your package.json
, you might have something like:
"scripts": {
"test": "run-script-os",
"test:darwin:linux": "export NODE_ENV=test && mocha",
"test:win32": "SET NODE_ENV=test&& mocha"
}
Then you could run npm test
on Windows, Mac, or Linux and get similar (or different!) results on each.
It depends on exactly what you're trying to do in the scripts, but it's likely that you can use npm cli packages to effectively add cross-platform commands to any shell.
For example, if you wanted to delete a directory, you could use separate syntaxes for windows and linux:
rm -rf _site # bash
rd /s /q _site # cmd
Or insead, you could use the npm package rimraf
which works cross platform:
npx rimraf _site
To take Dave P's example above, you could set environment variables with cross-env
like this:
"scripts": {
"test": "npx cross-env NODE_ENV=test mocha",
}
And if you don't want to use npx
to install scripts live, you can install them globally ahead of time like this:
npm i cross-env -g
Here's a post I wrote on making NPM scripts work cross platform which explores some of these options