Ender Installer

A component of the Ender CLI, providing an additional layer on top of Ender's npm wrapper Ender Repository.

Installing packages is not as simple as just asking npm to install them, there is additional logic we need in order to get exactly what we want and also to control npm (in particular, npm needs '.' to be installed separately). Our install logic allows us to install more than just the standard package.json "dependencies", we can also install "ender"->"dependencies". We also get to skip installing dependencies that already exist which the npm API doesn't allow us to do directly. The basic flow is: (1) check dependency status in node_modules, (2) ask npm to install anything missing, (3) repeat until there's not left to install. One special case is that we always ask npm to install packages specified by a path (i.e. local).

Executable

If you install with npm install ender-installer -g then you'll get an ender-installer executable that you can use to install npm packages, the Ender way. Combined with the executable in Ender Builder you'd have complete Ender install & build tools separate from the main Ender CLI.

The executable obeys the --force-install command; without it, it'll not reinstall packages that have already been installed.

$ ender-installer ender-js bonzo bean traversty --force-install

About Ender

For more information check out http://ender.jit.su

API

enderInstaller(options, packages, callback)

Ender Installer exports a single main function that performs the installation. The options object can contain a 'force-install' boolean (i.e. from --force-install on the command line) that will force an install from npm even if the package is already installed in node_modules ('_force-install' is an alternative and is used upstream to indicate that the option shouldn't be saved to the build file's command line string, i.e. ender refresh does a --force-install but that option isn't left in the build file).

The packages argument is an array of packages to be installed, npm-style so they can contain @semvers and even be filesystem paths.

The callback has the signature: function (err, npmResults, dependencyGraph) where npmResults is an array of results from Ender Repository's install() function and dependencyGraph is a DependencyGraph object generated from Ender Dependency Graph.

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Contributing

Contributions are more than welcome! Just fork and submit a GitHub pull request! If you have changes that need to be synchronized across the various Ender CLI repositories then please make that clear in your pull requests.

Tests

Ender Installer uses Buster for unit testing. You'll get it (and a bazillion unnecessary dependencies) when you npm install in your cloned local repository. Simply run npm test to run the test suite.

Licence

Ender Installer is Copyright (c) 2012 @rvagg, @ded, @fat and other contributors. It is licenced under the MIT licence. All rights not explicitly granted in the MIT license are reserved. See the included LICENSE file for more details.