Many of my repositories these days are making use of the workspace feature. It started with yarn, but recently npm@^7.7.0 gained support for workspace commands. It is quite a bit of typing for every command though. So I created an alias to nw in my .bashrc file. This typically resides in your home or user directory.

This function operates in your terminal and accepts args. In the vein of yarn workspace, the command expects nw <package> <command>. NPM workspaces also allow for an array of (or otherwise multiple packages). This function then lets you enter nw <command> <package1> <package2> <package3> for any number of packages that you want to run the command on.

function nw() {
    if [ "$#" -gt 2 ]; then
        local ws=''
        for arg in $@
        do
            ws="$ws --workspace=$arg"
        done
        npm run-script $1 $ws
    else
        npm run-script $2 --workspace=$1
    fi
}

While I was editing it, I figured it made sense to add an alias for npm run as well generally for those repositories that aren’t workspaces.

alias nr='npm run'

Happy terminal bashing! Let me know on the socials if you have any other nifty helpers in this same vein.