NPMMVN

Hack to persist Node modules to a Maven repository, and then read them back later. Our use-case is a Jenkins server that has no public internet access, but that needs to run Grunt-based front-end builds. The common alternative of just shoving node_modules into source control wasn't acceptable, since we found ourselves duplicating hundreds of megabytes of modules across many repositories.

To get started, add an extra entry to your package.json:

"mavenRepository": "http://your_server/repository/your_repo"

And install npmmvn globally:

npm install -g npmmvn

This tool provides two commands:

npmmvn deploy

You want to do this before you commit a change which requires new or updated NPM packages.

Recursively deploys every module found in node_modules as a Maven artifact with groupId node_modules, and artifactId and version taken from each module's package.json. Skips modules which already exist in the repository. Writes a .npmmvn.json file which records this structure, and which should be committed to source control.

npmmvn restore

You want to do this as part of your CI build (and possibly also when you first check out a repository, though I'd probably prefer to just do npm install in that case).

Reads the .npmmvn.json file and downloads and extracts every referenced package which doesn't currently exist locally into the node_modules directory. The result is the same nested dependency structure as the original.

Then runs npm rebuild to install .bin links etc.

Notes

• We're currently pretty dumb about already-installed packages. We never remove or upgrade existing modules. So, restore into an empty node_modules to ensure correct behaviour.

• We look at the installed contents of node_modules - we don't check that they match packages.json or that they are in any way clean.

• Npm rebuild scripts for some modules do their own downloads. Npmmvn currently doesn't help with that. The easiest option is to hack the module to download from somewhere accessible before deploying.

License

Copyright (c) 2013 Jamie Webb

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.