Install a locally developed npm package globally

Please try to pack the module and install.

npm pack

and then install it globally

npm i -g my_module-0.0.1.tgz

Let me know is this worked or not

I faced the same issue recently. I developed my module as a CLI with the intent to be able to invoke it from anywhere, published it to the NPM registry and installed it using the -g option but when calling it from the command line I was still getting the command not found error. Adding the bin attribute to the package.json file is what did the trick.

From the NPM documentation:

A lot of packages have one or more executable files that they’d like to install into the PATH. npm makes this pretty easy (in fact, it uses this feature to install the “npm” executable.)

To use this, supply a bin field in your package.json which is a map of command name to local file name. On install, npm will symlink that file into prefix/bin for global installs, or ./node_modules/.bin/ for local installs.

Meaning your package.json file should look like this:

{
    "name": "foo-cli",
    "version": "1.0.0",
    "description": "A CLI to do Foo-ish things.",
    "bin": {
        "foo": "./cli.js"
    },
    "main": "main.js",
    ...
}

The property can be a single string if you only wish to specify one single command, or a map if you wish to specify many. Now you should be able to call foo from anywhere in the command line.

After setting up the right package.json configuration, (mainly using {"bin": {...}}), You don't have to publish it to NPM registry then download it again to see it working.

npm link made exactly for this situations. as described in the offical documentation:

npm link in a package folder will create a symlink in the global folder {prefix}/lib/node_modules/ that links to the package where the npm link command was executed.

Assuming you have this project:

-- my_module

-- -- index.js
-- -- cli.js
-- -- package.json

and you have this package.json:

{
  "name": "my_module",
  "bin": {
    "my_module": "cli.js"
  },
}

Run:

cd my_module

Then:

npm link

Now npm will install your package globally in your machine. it will check the package.json for the bin entry, and it will link my_module to the cli.js file. This will happen by creating a symlink in the global npm directory to your current directory.

now if you run in your command line:

my_module

it will point to the cli.js file. if you changed cli.js contents, it will be reflected the next time you run my_module, if you renamed my_module to my_module2, use npm unlink then npm link again.

---

On a different note, npm can use a full url as a package name, it will use the full url to download and install the package instead of looking at the npm registry, you can install packages from your own private Git hosts, for example:

npm install -g https://github.com/Me/my_module