Making a node virtualenv

These days npm ships with nodejs, which you can install on ubuntu with::

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chris-lea/node.js -y
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nodejs

By default I have 2 ways of using npm::

sudo npm -g install bower

This (depending on how and where npm was installed) installs itself into /usr/local. The thing you installs goes on your PATH. But I don’t really let anything near /usr unless it’s in a Debian package. So I can also do::

npm install bower

This will create a node_modules directory in the current working directory. If i want to run bower I can just run::

node_modules/.bin/bower

Which is a bit yuck. Neither of these really cut it for me - I have been spoiled by virtualenv. Can I npm into my virtualenv - and have . bin/activate work for the node stuff too?

First of all I want a virtualenv::

virtualenv /home/john/myvirtualenv

npm -g tries to write into /usr/local because that is the default prefix config option. But I need to use -g so that I can get the bin/bower to appear. Helpfully you can override the prefix from the command line::

npm -g --prefix /home/john/myvirtualenv install bower

Now when i . bin/activate the JS binaries are available too.

Taking this one step further, you can install npm into a virtualenv and then set the default prefix::

npm -g --prefix /home/john/myvirtualenv install npm

cat > /home/john/myvirtualenv/lib/node_modules/npm/npmrc << EOF
prefix /home/john/myvirtualenv
global true
EOF

Now I can do this::

. /home/john/myvirtualenv/bin/activate
npm install bower lessc requirejs

And the dependencies are installed into that virtualenv - so as long as i have sourced my activate file I can just::

bower

I’ve written virtualenv-js which does the 2 steps for you.

You can use it with mkvirtualenv of virtualenv wrapper by putting it in ~/.virtualenvs/ and adding this to ~/.virtualenvs/postmkvirtualenv::

#!/bin/bash
# This hook is run after a new virtualenv is activated.
~/.virtualenvs/virtualenv-js $VIRTUAL_ENV

(Make sure you chmod +x virtualenv-js). (You could also just save virtualenv-js as postmkvirtualenv if you want).