Change working directory for npm scripts

Q: Is it possible to change the the context in which npm runs scripts?

What I want to is the following:

"scripts": {
   "test": "gulp mocha",
   "pre-install": "./deps/2.7/cpython/configure --prefix=$(pwd)/build --exec-prefix=$(pwd)/build && make -C deps/2.7/cpython && make -C deps/2.7/cpython install",
   "install": "node-gyp rebuild"
},

Obviously cd deps/2.7/cpython/ && ./configure would work on UNIX-like systems but not on windows.

Why: The root of the problem is, that the configure command of the python repo outputs files into the directory where it is called. The files however are build relevant for make and make install which look for the files in the directory of the repo.

In this case I can't change the Makefile since the build process of Python is understandably complex.

Alternative: The alternative is probably to write some install.js and use node's OS independent API and some child_process.exec(), which I am probably gonna do. However, not leaving npm would be really nice.

Solution 1:

npm allows only to do cd dir && command -args, which will also run on Windows.

A change to use node's spawn functionality has been made in PR https://github.com/npm/npm/pull/10958, but was rejected, due to the above solution.

Solution 2:

As noted above:

npm is probably using

var spawn = require('child_process').spawn

which would allow you to set options like:

    {cwd: pwd + 'somepath'}

but isn't exposing it.

I've solved it with a fairly large install.js, which does roughly that and it gets called from package.json like above. The API of child_process isn't that easy to handle, though, since it throws loads of hard to debug errors. Took me some time, but I am happy now.