[Feature request] install packages from other registries, or https CDN sources

[ortonomy]

Motivation

Love RunJS and the node package support. It's really useful and saves me a lot of time to have to create my own little node project with TS support every time I just want a REPL to test code...

But....

Recently SheetJS / xlsx took a really weird decision to publish an update ONLY on their CDN as a tarball https://docs.sheetjs.com/docs/getting-started/installation/nodejs

So now, I can't install the latest version in RunJS

Idea

• allow installing libs from github registries (by logging into to different registries other than NPM)
• allow install packages from HTTPS sources

Thanks for listening!

[lukehaas]

Thanks, @ortonomy. I've previously looked into this. However, I encountered issues during the build step of a lot of common packages. Some can be installed without issues this way, usually, the ones that include dist files. But the lack of reliability around building packages made me not ship this as a feature.
I might take a second look someday as it's certainly something that would be good to support.

[ortonomy]

Thanks for responding so fast @lukehaas .

How do you manage the package under the hood? In a package JSON? Could it be something you put behind an "Experimental" feature wall or "HERE BE DRAGONS - UNSUPPORTED FEATURE" kind of thing? Seems yarn, npm, and pnpm are all capable of handling this (at least from sheetJS's instructions)

Come on, gimme access 😄 Let me fiddle with that package.json file

[lukehaas]

It uses NPM to install and manage the packages. You could cd'ing into the RunJS app support directory, which is where the package.json is and try manually installing packages from github there.

[ortonomy]

Thank you! I'll let you know how it goes :D

[oculus42]

Manual install from ~/Library/Application Support/runjs works for me.

Notes on my experience:
Creating the npm config .npmrc file in that folder can cause some problems for the RunJS package lookup GUI. I set up an npm proxy (non-ssl) and was unable to lookup/install packages with a global, insecure registry set. I did not experience lookup issues for the nom global registry when using a scoped registry entry, but I was unable to lookup packages from that scope/registry.

None of that is surprising, but if someone places a .npmrc file in the folder they should expect it to cause headaches.