The last couple of weeks, I have been working on multiple NPM packages. And for every package I had to copy various files I need so that the linters and the editor behave as I expect:

• .editorconfig → UTF-8, indent style and site, etc.
• .gitattributes → so that package.json stays with LF.
• .jscrc → settings for JSCS.
• .jshintrc → settings for JSHINT.
• .babelrc → settings for Babel.

I have now over a dozen of these projects, which should all share the same files. And changing one single setting requires manually copying them over to all other projects, which is tedious.

npm to the rescue

At first, I hoped I could use git to somehow share the files, e.g. as using submodules. This did not work, as I need to deploy all these files in the root, and I could not find a means to do this with git submodules.

Then I figured that I could create an npm package which, when installed, would copy template files to the project root. And that’s how generic-js-env and babel-env got born.

In the postinstall step of these packages, I start a small JavaScript program which figures out what path to use for the root folder, then simply enumerates all files found in the template folder and copies them all to the root, possibly overwriting already existing files.

Show me the code

Here is the script that gets executed when you install the generic-js-env package (such as running npm install --save-dev generic-js-env):

var cwd = process.cwd ().replace (/\\/g, '/');
var suffix = '/node_modules/generic-js-env';

if (cwd.endsWith (suffix)) {
  var root = cwd.substr (0, cwd.length - suffix.length);
  var files = fs.readdirSync (path.join (cwd, 'templates'));
  files.forEach (function (file) {
    var data = fs.readFileSync (path.join (cwd, 'templates', file));
    fs.writeFileSync (path.join (root, file), data);
  });
}

I did not find another way to locate the root folder, so I decided to start from the current working directory (that’s the root of the installed node module) and move up two levels.

Obviously, the generic-js-env and babel-env packages are tailored for my own needs, and they most certainly won’t match your settings. So feel free to fork the repos and produce your own versions.