README.md

Say you have an npm project with a start script in package.json. You can run this and pass commands to it like:

npm start --silent -- ARG1 ARG2 ARG3

(using --silent because you probably don't want to see NPM's boilerplate error message if your script fails).

But that's a little tedious to add all those extra bits, and for people trying to use your tool who aren't real familiar with npm, they might not know to -- before the script arguments. So just drop this bash script into the root of your directory instead, and then you can run it like:

./npm-start.bash ARG1 ARG2 ARG3

I recommend you rename the bash script to the name of your project/tool.

And you don't even have to run the script from the same directory!

npm-start.bash

#!/bin/bash

DIR="$( cd "$( dirname "${BASH_SOURCE[0]}" )" >/dev/null 2>&1 && pwd )"

if [ ! -d "$DIR/node_modules" ]
then
    npm --prefix "$DIR" install
fi

npm --prefix "$DIR" --silent start -- $@