Node

Installing npm modules globally without sudo

/ nidkil / Leave a comment

I needed to install pm2 globally and run it as non root. This meant installing it with npm without using the sudo command. However, when you do this npm will throw an error.

“Error: EACCES: permission denied”

The npm documentation does provide a solution that works, which has a caveat.

  1. Make a directory for global installations: 
    mkdir ~/.npm-global
  2. Configure npm to use the new directory path: 
    npm config set prefix '~/.npm-global'
  3. Open or create a ~/.profile file and add this line: 
    export PATH=~/.npm-global/bin:$PATH
  4. Back on the command line, update your system variables: 
    source ~/.profile

As a side note, an easier way to execute step 3 is:

echo 'export PATH=~/.npm-global/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.profile

When I initially executed these steps it worked. However, after logging out and in again the pm2 command was no longer available. It turns out that on login the .bash_profile file is loaded instead of the .profile. Actually bash will try loading ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bash_login and ~/.profile, in that order. Once it finds one of them it will not try and load any of the others. After adding the statement to .bash_profile it worked like a dream.

echo 'export PATH=~/.npm-global/bin:$PATH' >> ~/.bash_profile

Hope this helps someone.

Override module loaded by require

/ nidkil / Leave a comment

I was using the module redact-secrets with Winston logger. This module makes sensitive data like passwords unreadable in logfiles. Very cool and handy module. It makes use of another module is-secret that contains a collection of patterns to determine what sensitive data is. One piece of sentive data was missing from is-secret: pass. I could fix it on my side, but I prefer the original GitHub project to be updated so others can also profit from it. So I submitted an issue on GitHub. While waiting for the fix I needed to continue with my development work. So I used another handy module override-require. This module overrides the resolution logic of require. So you can use it to override a dependency of a module. I used it in the following to overrule is-secret used by redact-secrets.

const overrideRequire = require('override-require');

// Check if a request needs to be overridden
const isOverride = (request) => {
return request === 'is-secret';
};

// If isOverride is true, load the module with the overridden module
const resolveRequest = (request) => {
return require('./overrule/is-secret');
};

// Initialize overide-require
const restoreOriginalModuleLoader = overrideRequire(isOverride, resolveRequest);

const { createLogger, format, transports } = require('winston');
// When redacts-secrets is loaded override-require will kickin and load our own module
const redact = require('redact-secrets')('******');
const fs = require('fs');
const path = require('path');

// Disable override require
restoreOriginalModuleLoader();

 

That’s it. Pretty cool isn’t it?

Adding hot reload to featherjs

/ nidkil / Leave a comment

Feathers is a very cool framework to quickly and easily setup API’s. Version 3 comes with a very cool CLI that generates all the scafolding code for you and makes it extremely easy to add services, hooks, etc. One thing that is missing is hot reloading to simplify the development proces. This is were nodemon comes to the rescue.

nodemon is a tool that helps developing node.js based applications by automatically restarting the node application when file changes in the directory are detected.

Setting nodemon up with Feather and Webpack si a simple two step proces.

  1. Install nodemon 
    npm install --save-dev nodemon
  2. Add one line to the scripts section of Webpacks package.json file 
    ...
  },
  "scripts": {
    "test": "npm run eslint && npm run mocha",
    "dev": "node ./node_modules/nodemon/bin/nodemon.js src/",
    "eslint": "eslint src/. test/. --config .eslintrc.json",
    "start": "node src/",
    "mocha": "mocha test/ --recursive"
  }
...

Now start Feathers using the following command.

npm run dev

That’s it, simple right?