Should support use project local flow bin

[kerryChen95]

I use linter-flow without npm i -g flow-bin, and get error:

~/.atom/packages/linter/lib/linter-registry.js:159 [Linter] Error running Flow Error: Failed to spawn command flow. Make sure flow is installed and on your PATH

I think linter-flow should support use project local flow bin as optional, for example use <project root>/node_modules/.bin/flow if it exists, so we can use the same version of flow bin for both Atom's linter-flow and command npm run flow.

[nwshane]

Any updates on this?

[stackptr]

This is also reflected in the Flow install docs as a best practice: https://flow.org/en/docs/install/

Flow works best when installed per-project with explicit versioning rather than globally.

[nwshane]

I thought using local flow didn't work when I was looking into this yesterday, but it turns out that I had my linter package disabled. I'm using linter-flow 5.6.0, I set ./node_modules/.bin/flow as my flow executable in linter-flow's settings, and it's working as expected.

Hope that's useful to someone.

[stackptr]

It makes sense that that setting would work, but I don't feel it's very intuitive + the default assumption is a global install when that seems like it should be the special case (with the default to using node_modules)

I was looking at how AtomLinter/linter-eslint accomplishes using local vs global versions of the linting tool (though it seems I might be unaware of certain requirements specifically relating to flow running as a server) and it seems like some of that logic can be ported pretty readily. I would be a fan of a simpler solution to default to ./node_modules/.bin/flow unless a global instance is indicated, but I think this falls short when working directories are set inside/outside that root directory where node_modules lives.

Hoping to submit a PR for this issue soon!

[alexbainter]

For anyone else on Windows, you'll need to use backslashes instead of forward slashes (.\node_modules\.bin\flow)

[far-blue]

I can't get the ./node_modules/.bin/flow trick to work and would really prefer either than flow was bundled in the plugin or that the plugin was able to find and use a local flow binary rather than installing one globally.

[mifrej]

+1 for project specific "local". This is how linter-eslint works and so that should this very one also followed same pattern

[stackptr]

This is a rough first pass: https://github.com/AtomLinter/linter-flow/pull/180

[mileung]

I think I'm getting the same issue, but I have the linter package enabled.

[Linter] Error running Flow Error: Failed to spawn command flow. Make sure flow is installed and on your PATH

Or is this a different issue?

[el1f]

This in particular makes it even less obvious