How best to deploy NodeJS commandline application

[Michael Uman]

Hello,

I am rather new to the entire NodeJS environment so please be nice...

I have been working with NodeJS, Electron, and a variety of NPM packages for several months now and would like to deploy my simple commandline application to others in my organization. I do not want to publish my code to the NPM repository though and would rather be able to either package the system in a Debian .deb installer or somehow use the Git repo which I store the project in as a source for the installation.

I have tried just using 'npm install -g git+ssh://xxxxxxx' and it worked a couple of times but cannot fathom why it is not working any more. I always use sudo when installing with the '-g' option and often run into 'privilege' errors. When I just clone my project repository and run 'npm install && sudo npm install -g' the installation seems to work but it just creates a symlink to my checked out repository. I do not want this, I want to have the application installed in the system (ie /usr/local/bin).

My project is written in Typescript and I have the development environment working very well (after a lot of wrangling the tsconfig.json, tslint.json, and package.json files. I am transpiling to ES6 and use a few NPM modules (sprintfs-js, commander, clear, colors, and @types for node & color)...

For reference here is my package.json:

{

"name": "hazard-check",

"version": "1.0.0",

"description": "Pipeline hazard checking tool",

"main": "dist/hazard-check.js",

"files": [

"src/",

"dist/"

],

"dependencies": {

"clear": "0.0.1",

"colors": "^1.1.2",

"commander": "^2.11.0",

"sprintf-js": "^1.1.1"

},

"devDependencies": {

"@types/colors": "^1.1.3",

"@types/node": "^8.0.53",

"typescript": "^2.6.1"

},

"scripts": {

"test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"

},

"bin": "./dist/hazard-check.js",

"keywords": [],

"author": "Michael A. Uman",

"license": "ISC"

}

I much appreciate the support from the members of the NodeJS community. I am impressed with the capabilities of Javascript even though I am a long-time C/C++ developer (with some scripting).

If anyone has a pointer how to go about deploying my application via an installer (ie .deb) or somehow using NPM with my git repository I would be very grateful.

Happy Holidays to everyone!

Michael Uman

[Michael Uman]

Hello Everyone,

Sorry for the post. I spent some time and looked into the NPM repo and found the 'node-deb' tool which was developed expressly for the purpose of packaging a NodeJS project into a Debian .deb installer. I have downloaded it, updated my package.json and just created a debian installer for my package. So far I think this satisfies my requirements.

So in case anyone else has this questions please find the 'node-deb' NPM package and download it and read the README documentation. It took me about 10 minutes to get the installer to work.

https://www.npmjs.com/package/node-deb

Thank you,
Michael Uman

[Zlatko]

Hi Michael,

node-deb is one way to distribute that package. But since your users will have to have a node binary on the system anyway, you can still use npm, just publish the app in a private namespace. Name your package with the org scope, e.g. my private packages on npm are scoped to @zladuric, e.g. "name": "@zladuric/my-project". When you have your company organization (or personal account), you can publish like that and only give access to people (or orgs) which you want to.

It's definitely a viable alternative.

[Nathan Rajlich]

pkg could suit your needs!
https://github.com/zeit/pkg

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