Introducing the NPM Maven Plugin

Introduction

Suppose that you have a Maven project and you want to download Node.js modules previously uploaded to NPM. One way of doing that without running node is by using the npm-maven-plugin. It allows the user to download the required Node modules without running node.js: It is completely implemented on the JVM.

Getting Started

First of all, you will need to add the Mule Maven repo to your pom.xml file:

<repository>
  <id>mulesoft-releases</id>
  <name>MuleSoft Repository</name>
  <url>https://repository.mulesoft.org/releases/</url> 
</repository>

After doing that, you will need to add the following to the build->plugin section of your pom.xml file:

<plugin>
    <groupId>org.mule.tools.javascript</groupId>
    <artifactId>npm-maven-plugin</artifactId>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <executions>
        <execution>
            <phase>generate-sources</phase>
            <goals>
                <goal>fetch-modules</goal>
            </goals>
            <configuration>
                <packages>
                    <package>colors:0.5.1</package>
                    <package>jshint:0.8.1</package>
                </packages>
            </configuration>
        </execution>
    </executions>
</plugin>

Then just execute:

mvn generate-sources

One more thing…

By default, the modules can be found in src/main/resources/META-INF but that path can be changed setting the ‘outputDirectory’ parameter.

Also, module transitivity is taken into account. That means that it will download all the required dependencies before downloading the specified module.

Show me the code!

The source code can be found here. Feel free to fork the project and propose changes to it.

Happy (Node.js and Maven) hacking!