Shrew 🐁

This module has only one function and it returns the root path of the current main module when using with NPM.

const shrew = require ('shrew');
const root = shrew ();

It's very useful in the case where you have a dependency (a module in node_modules/) and you want to retrieve the main module path. More precisely the module which is running a script with NPM.

The main module is not always located in the parent ../ because you can't be 100% sure that there is only one level of node_modules/. Since node >=5, it seems that all modules are placed in the root node_modules directory. But it's possible that some modules are nested because it relies on uncompatible versions of the same module (for example, two different major versions). An other case is the use of npm link where the modules are always nested.

Fine, how to use it?

In your package.json file, sometimes you want to call a command in a postinstall script (for example). Or any other scripts even custom scripts.

{
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "my-super-command"
  }
}

This command is deployed in your ./node_modules/.bin directory and uses some other modules like ./node_modules/my-super-command/node_modules/one-lib. The module one-lib wants to change something in the root directory of your module.

In this case, one-lib can not just use the parent directory ../ in order to retrieve the main module. It's here that Shrew is useful. The one-lib module must use shrew () in order to retrieve the path on the module where the postinstall script is called.

Why it's working only with NPM?

You can't use Shrew without NPM because this library uses an environment variable set by NPM. Without this variable, it's not possible to retrieve the main module.