Make it easy to install a package globally and locally about oclif HOT 2 CLOSED

This is doable as a plugin—though it'd be a bit of a strange one. You would have an init hook in the plugin that would proxy over to the locally installed CLI. I'm not sure I would load it though, it'd be safer across versions to use child_process to run the bin. That way if you ever wanted to migrate away from oclif or oclif internals changed significantly in a major release it would continue to work. You don't have to know about the internals that way either.

As far as the version command, that's a bit more difficult but still doable. You'd have to have a custom main multi class that would override the behavior of the version flags. To make that easier, I could add a version hook to listen to so instead it would just be a matter of listening to the version hook.

In terms of fetching the version, I would set an environment variable when launching the dev CLI like CLARK_PARENT_VERSION=1.0.0.

Alternatively, you could just use npx. It's made to solve this problem though I don't know how well it would work in a lerna setup.

Right now this all seems pretty complex though. I wouldn't recommend any kind of automatic switching because I think it would be surprising to the end-user. I understand the issue though. What I do in this case is install CLIs globally but lock down the major version in CI environments like this:

yarn global add mycli@2
mycli foobar

But you could also use npx:

npx mycli@2 foobar

That way you retain some control over the version of the CLI but don't need to execute it under node_modules. It's not a perfect solution but it's the simplest and best pattern I've seen for node CLIs.

from oclif.

Cleaning up - if you think this issue is still valid, reopen it. Thanks!

from oclif.