how to create npm package with a demo app?

Question

It seems good practice for packages to provide some type of demo app, so I'm just wondering what's the cleanest way to organize the file structure?

I want to have one github repo that contains my published NPM module and a simple demo webapp.

Ideally I would like a top level like:

package/
demo/

and have the code just in package/ get distributed to NPM. I could use the package.json files option like

files: [ 'package' ]

But then all the code will get distributed with that path prefix, eg

node_modules/MyPackageName/package/index.js

Is there a way to modify the path prefix so it changes the top-level directory and removes the extra package/ I used to organize the files?

Sure other people have ways to do this, but I'd prefer not to use two repos - one demo and one package.

Clarification I want to be able to install the package directly from github, as a kind of "poor-mans private NPM". So I don't want to just publish from within the 'package' directory. I think using github URLs you can specify a branch to use, but not a subdirectory.

Answer 1

You can do this with the help of NODE_PATH env variable:

export NODE_PATH='yourdir'/node_modules

Reference

If the NODE_PATH environment variable is set to a colon-delimited list of absolute paths, then Node.js will search those paths for modules if they are not found elsewhere.

On Windows, NODE_PATH is delimited by semicolons (;) instead of colons.

NODE_PATH was originally created to support loading modules from varying paths before the current module resolution algorithm was frozen.

NODE_PATH is still supported, but is less necessary now that the Node.js ecosystem has settled on a convention for locating dependent modules. Sometimes deployments that rely on NODE_PATH show surprising behavior when people are unaware that NODE_PATH must be set. Sometimes a module's dependencies change, causing a different version (or even a different module) to be loaded as the NODE_PATH is searched.

Additionally, Node.js will search in the following list of GLOBAL_FOLDERS:

1: $HOME/.node_modules 2: $HOME/.node_libraries 3: $PREFIX/lib/node Where $HOME is the user's home directory, and $PREFIX is Node.js's configured node_prefix.

These are mostly for historic reasons.

It is strongly encouraged to place dependencies in the local node_modules folder. These will be loaded faster, and more reliably.