Working with NPM Tasks

NpmTask type

NpmTask is a generic task type for running NPM commands. In its simplest form it takes an npm command and a collection or arguments.

task createPackageJson( type : org.ysb33r.gradle.nodejs.tasks.NpmTask ) {
    command 'init' (1)
    cmdArgs '-f', '-y' (2)
}

1	`npm` command
2	Arguments that are applicable to the specific command

Customisation

By default, an NpmTask will obtain the location of node from the node project extension and any NPM configuration from the npm project extension. However, this plugin allows you to have a lot of flexibility should you need it. Therefore, you can override any of the settings in both of the aforementioned extensions in task extensions by the same name. This allows you to for instance run a specific task with a different version of node than the global configured version.

By taking the same previous example, you can do

task createPackageJson( type : org.ysb33r.gradle.nodejs.tasks.NpmTask ) {
    command 'init'
    cmdArgs '-f', '-y'

    nodejs {
      executable version : '7.10.0' (1)
    }

    npm {
      localConfig "${projectDir}/npmrc2" (2)
    }
}

1	Change the specific of `node` when executing this task.
2	Use a different local configuration file.

This kind of flexibility is not applicable for probably the majority of cases, but there are specific use cases where this is extremely helpful.

Any other parameters that you would expect to see in a Gradle ExecSpec can be used as well.