Execute npm with ant - npm

Question

I want to automate the build of an application with frontend and backend. To do this I want to use maven with ant for platform independent copy and cli tasks. With some cli's like docker ... this works. But this does not work for cli's provided by npm or npm itself.
<exec executable="docker">
<arg line="version"/>
</exec>
<!--Works-->
<exec executable="C:\Program Files\nodejs\npm.cmd">
<arg line="version"/>
</exec>
<!--Doesn't work-->
<exec executable="npm">
<arg line="version"/>
</exec>
As seen in the second example, the script works if I specify the full path to the npm.cmd. But this should work at least on windows and unix. So specifying the full path is not an option.
Is there any way to run npm and its modules from ant?
Late edit:
The real problem was, that the windows node installer also placed a file named npm into the bin folder which is a bash script meant for cygwin. The npm bin folder was added to the 'global' PATH env var and the windows cmd did pick up the correct binary because it uses the PATHEXT env var to determine what is executable and what not. The ant exec plugin does not use PATHEXT and just executes the first file named npm which fails. The Solution was to rename the plain npm file in the path. This way ant sees the npm.cmd file first and everything runs smoothly.

Answer 1

I know this is old, but this is what I have, for others in the future. Works in our mac, unix, and windows boxes.
<macrodef name="exec-node">
<attribute name="module" description="The name of the NodeJS module to execute" />
<attribute name="failonerror" default="true" description="Fail if the exit code is not 0" />
<attribute name="dir" description="Directory to execute task" />
<element name="args" implicit="yes" description="Argument to pass to the exec task" />
<sequential>
<exec executable="cmd.exe" dir="#{dir}" failonerror="#{failonerror}" osfamily="winnt">
<arg line="/c #{module}" />
<args />
</exec>
<exec executable="#{module}" dir="#{dir}" failonerror="#{failonerror}" osfamily="unix" logError="true">
<args />
</exec>
</sequential>
</macrodef>
Then things like this can work
<exec-node dir="${node.project.dir}" module="npm" failonerror="true" >
<arg value="run" />
<arg value="lint" />
</exec-node>
You can of course hardcode module as npm, or default it, but I use this with npm and npx.

Answer 2

From what I can gather, its not possible to call npm directly through the antrun plugin.
I did manage to get it tu run by calling cmd (on windows) with the /c argument.
Example:
<exec executable="cmd">
<arg line="/c npm run babel -- src/main/webapp/js/es6/ --presets babel-preset-es2015 --out-dir src/main/webapp/js/"/>
</exec>

Answer 3

This works for me on Windows:
<exec executable="npm.cmd">
<arg value="version"/>
</exec>

Answer 4

If you like to use npm you should take a look at the frontend-maven-plugin.