Have you ever seen this in your code?
var thingy = require('../../../../thingy.js');
There are lots of “solutions” to this problem. There is even a gist outlining
seven of them. To be frank, all seven of them have issues. I’ve spent a
stupid amount of time trying to solve this problem. I wanted a solution where I
could simply require a module that would return a string of the absolute path
to the base of my project. That way you could simply do:
var __base = require('__base');
var thingy = require(__base + 'lib/thingy.js');
Originally I built the project-base npm package that worked. The problem is
that it relies on the fact that npm installs your modules into the
node_modules directory that lives directly below the base of your project.
Recently npm optimized its dependency algorithm to flatten the dependency tree
for duplicate modules. That broke the underlying assumption of project-base.
All that to say, I found a work around. Add the following postinstall to the
scripts section of your package.json:
{
...
"scripts": {
...
"postinstall": "mkdir -p ./node_modules/__base && echo \"module.exports = require('path').resolve(__dirname + '/../../') + '/';\" > ./node_modules/__base/index.js"
},
}
This will create a file in node_modules/__base that does exactly what you
would expect, returns the absolute path to the base of your project. Problem
solved!
Feel free to reach out to me on twitter @jondelamotte.