Not working with npx

[Graham42]

Instead of installing anything globally, I've moved to use npx which comes with npm 5, which is default with node 8

Expected this to work:

$ npx -p generate -p generate-license gen license

Instead I get this error trace

$ npx -p generate -p generate-license gen license
npx: installed 1432 in 18.068s
[14:41:45] starting generate
[14:41:45] ✔ running tasks: [ 'license' ]
Error: Cannot find generator: "license" in "/home/grahamm/<project_dir>"
    at Generate.<anonymous> (/home/grahamm/.npm/_npx/7206/lib/node_modules/generate/node_modules/base-generators/index.js:499:18)
    at iterate (/home/grahamm/.npm/_npx/7206/lib/node_modules/generate/node_modules/async-each-series/index.js:8:5)
    at Function.module.exports (/home/grahamm/.npm/_npx/7206/lib/node_modules/generate/node_modules/async-each-series/index.js:20:3)
    at Generate.generate (/home/grahamm/.npm/_npx/7206/lib/node_modules/generate/node_modules/base-generators/index.js:492:15)
    at /home/grahamm/.npm/_npx/7206/lib/node_modules/generate/node_modules/base-generators/index.js:475:18
    at iterate (/home/grahamm/.npm/_npx/7206/lib/node_modules/generate/node_modules/async-each-series/index.js:8:5)
    at Function.module.exports (/home/grahamm/.npm/_npx/7206/lib/node_modules/generate/node_modules/async-each-series/index.js:20:3)
    at Generate.generate (/home/grahamm/.npm/_npx/7206/lib/node_modules/generate/node_modules/base-generators/index.js:474:24)
    at Generate.generate (/home/grahamm/.npm/_npx/7206/lib/node_modules/generate/node_modules/base-generators/index.js:463:23)
    at /home/grahamm/.npm/_npx/7206/lib/node_modules/generate/bin/generate.js:117:11

[jonschlinkert]

What is npx? Is that a license supported by https://github.com/github/choosealicense.com (as stated on the readme)?

[jonschlinkert]

Oh, I see, npx is something else. I don't know anything about npm, so I might need to rely on someone else to help.

That error message isn't very helpful, I'll look into why it's happening, but it might be something to do with npx

[Graham42]

For reference, this is npx https://medium.com/@maybekatz/introducing-npx-an-npm-package-runner-55f7d4bd282b

[doowb]

@Graham42 I just looked into this some.

When using npx with the -p flag, npx will download the package into a temporary "global" folder. The way generate works is that it will look for modules in the actual npm global folder, local node_modules folder, and for a local generator.js file. Since npx is putting generate-license into a temporary folder, generate doesn't know where to find it.

I tried this out by installing generate-license locally: npm i generate-license, then I was able to run npx like this: npx -p generate gen license.

I'm not sure if there's anything we can do since npx is creating temporary directories sometimes.