Purpose of this repo

[rarkins]

runinstall is my punny name for a new complimentary capability for Containerbase.

The idea is not aimed at Renovate as a user yet but instead other Containerbase downstream users, of which I have a particular one at Mend which would need this.

This is for an application which calls commands like npm or poetry, but which isn't really "aware" of versions or dynamic installations.

Instead, that application would simply call npm install, and:

• runinstall would be aliased to npm (and others), so intercept the call to npm, and use argv to know what was called and cwd to know from where
• if NODE_VERSION is not specified in env then it would look in the cwd for e.g. .nvmrc, .node-version, or package.json to determine the version of Node.js to use, then run install-tool node
• if NPM_VERSION is not specified in env then use logic (e.g. package.json, or looking at the package-lock.json characteristics) to decide which npm version to install, then install it
• Now, call the version of npm which was just installed, passing on the same cwd and args

Potentially Renovate could even reuse this capability later.

[rarkins]

I've done a tiny PoC using Node.js and pkg to build it. The linux binary is around 40MB.

I think writing it in Go would make it smaller and probably faster, but I'm not sure if either gain is significant enough versus the benefits of:

• Keeping in TS aligned with Renovate skills, and
• Being able to reuse Renovate logic either directly (via imports or via copy/paste)

[viceice]

So this is some testing for this?

• Automatic runtime install of tools base#101