Question

I’m trying to get npm to install node-gitteh as a dependency via npm install which reads from package.json. Unfortunately this npm package is broken in node 0.6.x, but no problem as there’s a forked repo that fixes the issues (https://github.com/hughsk/node-gitteh.git).

Now the issue is that this forked repo has a submodule, so if I try to download the tar from github in the package.json:

, "dependencies" : {
    "gitteh" : "https://github.com/hughsk/node-gitteh/tarball/master"
}

I get an error that equates to "submodule folder not found". If I clone the same repo manually and do a recursive submodule update and an npm install from the node-gitteh folder, it works fine, but I can’t figure out how to get npm to do this.

Answer 1

I’ve had the same problem and so far have just relied on cloning my module into node_modules and doing a submodule update manually. It would be nice to have npm handle this automatically.

In package.json there’s a scripts field (see npm docs)
So could do

"scripts":{"preinstall": "git submodule update -i -r"}

See https://github.com/isaacs/octave-test for an example of this.