Support yarn's behavior for CLI lookups

[orta]

Hi folks, I was wondering about whether pnpm was interested in replicating the yarn's CLI experience for unknown commands.

Today if you install a new dependency which adds a binary, these binaries can be used with pnpx or ppm exec -r

pnpm add typescript -D

❯ pnpm tsc
 ERROR  Missing script: tsc
❯ pnpm exec tsc
 ERROR  The "pnpm exec" command currently only works with the "-r" option
❯ pnpm exec -r tsc

❯ pnpm tsc --init
 ERROR   ERROR  Unknown option: 'init'

vs Yarn's

yarn add typescript --dev
yarn tsc
yarn tsc --init

Yarn's missing CLI command props will check:

 - built-in command names
 - matching scripts in package.json
 - binaries in ./node_modules/.bin/

Which makes writing instructions trivial because it's always one app to call and much easier to reason about because it's always just a prefix to the rest of your commands. E.g. yarn eslint --fix.

Switching to this pattern isn't a breaking change (all the other commands can still work as-is) but it allows for people to migrate to the simpler CLI experience. Is there interest?

( also somewhat discussion for this in npm npm/rfcs#279 )

[zkochan]

I think it is a good idea. Contributions are welcomed.

[amitgilad3]

Hi, is anybody tackling this issue or can i give it a try ??

[zkochan]

Go ahead

[zkochan]

I will probably look into it now. Seems like you did not work on it yet.

[zkochan]

Actually, I am not sure we should add this to the Node.js CLI. I added it to the wrapper written in Rust, which runs much faster

[KSXGitHub]

Why didn't you just use pnpx?

[zkochan]

🚢 pnpm v6.6.0

[seahindeniz]

Congratulations on the update. I just test it with a script like pnpm -r lint and works as expected. ✨
May I ask, should it support pnpm recursive [arbitary command] or is this something like that should not be supported by design?

[zkochan]

Probably it should work but not all variants work now. I work on a subsequent update
#3492