How to set shell for npm run-scripts in Windows

Question

I'm running npm on Windows and would like to use & style parallel operations in run-scripts but running in parallel in cmd is kind of messy in my package.json file I'd like to write-

scripts: { "go": "cmd1 & cmd2"}  

but npm executes the script under cmd.exe which does not know about ; I could change this to scripts: { "go": "bats/bat1.bat") where bat1.bat is a cmd bat file that uses the windows style call or start commands to run commands in parallel. which works but gives me a script that only works on Windows.

It would be a lot simpler if I could get npm to run the script under a bash clone or cygwin.

I tried config: { "shell": "bash"} but that still ran cmd.exe

Is there any way to tell npm to run-scripts using a specific shell (not cmd.exe)?

Answer 1

Since npm 5.1

npm config set script-shell "C:\\Program Files (x86)\\git\\bin\\bash.exe"   

or (64bit installation)

npm config set script-shell "C:\\Program Files\\git\\bin\\bash.exe" 

Note that you need to have git for windows installed.

You can revert it by running:

npm config delete script-shell 

Answer 2

Here's one way to do it:

1. Create a script, such as my_script.sh, in your project bin directory.

2. In your package.json file, add a line to run the script using bash. For example:

   "scripts": {   "boogie": "bash bin/my_script.sh" } 

Now you can run your bash script from npm by:

    npm run-script boogie 

Not very elegant, but it works.

If you are developing in both Windows and Linux/Unix, then at least this approach is fairly portable to both environments.