Docs should not recommend installing cdk with -g (globally)

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/cdk/latest/guide/work-with.html#work-with-prerequisites recommends installing cdk and typescript with -g.

As someone who cares about reproducible builds and knows little about node.js, I found this page 100x more useful than the official docs:

https://www.endoflineblog.com/cdk-tips-01-how-to-use-local-cdk-commands

That says to use npx to init a new project, and npm run cdk afterwards. (And npm ci to reinstall cdk for an existing project)

I made myself this shell alias and it has raised my productivity immensely:

alias ncdk='npm run cdk --'

I think the default README.md generated by new projects should also say npm run cdk instead of cdk.

It makes no sense to recommend global cdk installs especially when you are releasing an incompatible major version 2 as we speak. Global tooling installs is also a violation of 12factor.net (point 2).

[skinny85]

@skinny85 If TypeScript is not installed globally, there’s no tsc command, and the scripts defined in the default package.json break. We could of course change package.json…

@Jerry-AWS that’s not how package.json files work. They do not use global commands - they use commands that are found in the node_modules/.bin directory, which gets automatically added to the PATH when executing a script from them.

More information: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/v7/using-npm/scripts#path

So, as long as there is a dependency in the package.json file on the typescript package (which our init templates do add), the tsc command will be available from there.

[hoegertn]

If you use npx cdk it will use the locally installed one and if non is existent it will temporarily install a global one for this call, which is perfect for cdk init.

Regarding tsc: It is not needed at all for CDK projects as the cdk.json runs the app with ts-node