Why do we need to install gulp globally and locally

Question

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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    Including the dependencies of your project locally ensures the version of gulp  or other dependencies  used is the originally intended version  Node doesn t consider global modules by default when using require    which you need to include gulp within your script    Ultimately  this is because the path to the global modules isn t added to NODE PATH by default  According to the Node development team  local modules load faster   I can t say why this is  but this would seem to be more relevant to node s use in production  i e  run-time dependencies  than in development  i e  dev dependencies    I suppose this is a legitimate reason as some may care about whatever minor speed advantage is gained loading local vs  global modules  but feel free to raise your eyebrow at this reason    Why do I need to install gulp globally if I ve already installed it locally    The rationale for installing gulp globally is really just the convenience  of having the gulp executable automatically found within your system path    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

User · Answer

When installing a tool globally it s to be used by a user as a command line utility anywhere  including outside of node projects  Global installs for a node project are bad because they make deployment more difficult   npm 5 2   The npx utility bundled with npm 5 2 solves this problem  With it you can invoke locally installed utilities like globally installed utilities  but you must begin the command with npx   For example  if you want to invoke a locally installed eslint  you can do   npx eslint     npm  lt  5 2  When used in a script field of your package json  npm searches node modules for the tool as well as globally installed modules  so the local install is sufficient   So  if you are happy with  in your package json     devDependencies          gulp    3 5 2     scripts          test    gulp test      etc  and running with npm run test then you shouldn t need the global install at all   Both methods are useful for getting people set up with your project since sudo isn t needed  It also means that gulp will be updated when the version is bumped in the package json  so everyone will be using the same version of gulp when developing with your project   Addendum   It appears that gulp has some unusual behaviour when used globally  When used as a global install  gulp looks for a locally installed gulp to pass control to  Therefore a gulp global install requires a gulp local install to work  The answer above still stands though  Local installs are always preferable to global installs

User · Answer

TLDR  Here s why      The reason this works is because gulp tries to run your gulpfile js using your locally installed version of gulp  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

User · Answer

You can link the globally installed gulp locally with  npm link gulp

[javascript] Why do we need to install gulp globally and locally?

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