2 manuals about gulp say that I need to install gulp first globally (with -g flag) and then one more time locally. Why do I need this?
This question is related to
javascript
gulp
Technically you don't need to install it globally if the node_modules
folder in your local installation is in your PATH
. Generally this isn't a good idea.
Alternatively if npm test
references gulp
then you can just type npm test
and it'll run the local gulp.
I've never installed gulp globally -- I think it's bad form.
You can link the globally installed gulp
locally with
npm link gulp
Just because I haven't seen it here, if you are on MacOS or Linux, I suggest you add this to your PATH (in your bashrc etc):
node_modules/.bin
With this relative path entry, if you are sitting in the root folder of any node project, you can run any command line tool (eslint, gulp, etc. etc.) without worrying about "global installs" or npm run
etc.
Once I did this, I've never installed a module globally.
The question "Why do we need to install gulp globally and locally?" can be broken down into the following two questions:
Why do I need to install gulp locally if I've already installed it globally?
Why do I need to install gulp globally if I've already installed it locally?
Several others have provided excellent answers to theses questions in isolation, but I thought it would be beneficial to consolidate the information in a unified answer.
Why do I need to install gulp locally if I've already installed it globally?
The rationale for installing gulp locally is comprised of several reasons:
Why do I need to install gulp globally if I've already installed it locally?
To avoid installing locally you can use npm link [package]
, but the link command as well as the install --global
command doesn't seem to support the --save-dev
option which means there doesn't appear to be an easy way to install gulp globally and then easily add whatever version that is to your local package.json file.
Ultimately, I believe it makes more sense to have the option of using global modules to avoid having to duplicate the installation of common tools across all your projects, especially in the case of development tools such as grunt, gulp, jshint, etc. Unfortunately it seems you end up fighting the tools a bit when you go against the grain.
TLDR; Here's why:
The reason this works is because
gulp
tries to run yourgulpfile.js
using your locally installed version ofgulp
, see here. Hence the reason for a global and local install of gulp.
Essentially, when you install gulp
locally the script isn't in your PATH
and so you can't just type gulp
and expect the shell to find the command. By installing it globally the gulp
script gets into your PATH
because the global node/bin/
directory is most likely on your path.
To respect your local dependencies though, gulp
will use your locally installed version of itself to run the gulpfile.js
.
I'm not sure if our problem was directly related with installing gulp only locally. But we had to install a bunch of dependencies ourself. This lead to a "huge" package.json and we are not sure if it is really a great idea to install gulp only locally. We had to do so because of our build environment. But I wouldn't recommend installing gulp not globally if it isn't absolutely necessary. We faced similar problems as described in the following blog-post
None of these problems arise for any of our developers on their local machines because they all installed gulp globally. On the build system we had the described problems. If someone is interested I could dive deeper into this issue. But right now I just wanted to mention that it isn't an easy path to install gulp only locally.
Source: Stackoverflow.com