Allow running custom tasks directly with npx

I’d like to be able to run an mrm task without a) globally installing mrm and b) without globally installing the task. I.e. just:

npx @my-org/my-task

And have that be it.

AFAIU right now I have to both npm i -g mrm as well as npm i -g @my-org/my-task, to finally be able to do mrm @my-org/my-task.

Granted, if I’m going to run mrm and @my-org/my-task repetitively, this is fine, but I’d like to use mrm for things similar to npx create-react-app, where users who want to use/install a library want to run just a one-time command or two, and won’t necessarily have/want mrm to be installed globally and stick around.

(Note that I know npx mrm works, but AFAIU I can’t avoid an npm i -g for custom tasks, i.e. how can I invoke @my-org/my-task with a single npx invocation?)

(Fwiw, my guess that this is admittedly tricky because npx would need to fetch both the core mrm as well as @my-org/my-task with a single npx invocation, so it’s probably “simplest” for the npx command to look like npx @my-org/my-task and then somehow the task knows it’s being run directly and actually invokes mrm with itself as the task to run.)

[stephenh]

@kevinkhill ah yeah, I get that. When I used to do Java projects back in the day, publishing to Maven central (their npm) was a huge PITA (mostly b/c Maven central was actually secure (for some definition of secure) and required registering your package via an email address from your org’s DNS) </soapbox> 😃 ).

So yeah being able to “just pull from a git url” seems neat too. Especially if it’s public/no auth.

[stephenh]

@kevinkhill personally publishing tasks to npm wasn’t a big deal for us. Really great to hear you’re poking around at mrm internals though! Its a great project.