Install cdktf-cli as part of TS template instead of relying on global installation

[acdoussan]

Community Note

• Please vote on this issue by adding a 👍 reaction to the original issue to help the community and maintainers prioritize this request
• Please do not leave "+1" or other comments that do not add relevant new information or questions, they generate extra noise for issue followers and do not help prioritize the request
• If you are interested in working on this issue or have submitted a pull request, please leave a comment

Description

Currently, the docs (and default project template after running cdktf init) require cdktf-cli to be installed globally. This defeats the purpose of npm's package management, where every project contains all its dependencies and can be repeatably built in different environments.

Currently, if there is a breaking change to the way cdktf-cli works, and I create a new template, but also have to work with an existing template, I would have to uninstall / reinstall cdktf-cli each time I want to switch which package I am working on, or manually add cdktf-cli as a dependency for each project, and uninstall it globally.

I am proposing two changes:

• Update the docs to use npx rather than instructing users to install cdktf-cli globally
  • See references for what it takes to make this work, but this should look something like npx create-react-app but for cdktf. So, for example, npx cdktf-init
• Update the project template from cdktf init to depend on cdktf-cli directly in its dependencies.

This should be pretty straightforward, but requires a new repository / published npm package that y'all should create.

References

https://blog.deepgram.com/npx-script/

[acdoussan]

This would also probably require updating other documentation as well as these run the global cli. Best path would likely be to add a "cdktf": "cdktf" script to the template, and then update the documentation to be npm run cdktf -- deploy or equivalent.

[acdoussan]

also might be good to expose the whole cdktf cli instead of just the init functionality (basically npx cdktf instead of npx cdktf-init)

[ansgarm]

Hi @acdoussan 👋
Thank you for proposing this! This would be very helpful for folks switching between different projects regularly.

That said, it is already possible to install the cdktf-cli as a dependency in the package.json, actually our typescript init template already does this and adds e.g. the npm run synth command (source) that will invoke that dependency.

However, as we're supporting multiple other languages and adding a package.json to a Python project would not feel natural to Python users, that path forward does not really work outside of TypeScript.

I still think we should find an answer to simplify working with multiple different CDKTF versions. However, I'm not sure whether npx would be the right way forward (at least as a recommendation; it already works today, try e.g. npx cdktf-cli@0.14.0 --version).

An alternative approach could be to change the cdktf-cli into a thin wrapper that determines a projects CDKTF version and uses the right cli package for that version.

[acdoussan]

Heya!

Yeah, was mostly focusing on the typescript implementation. You're right there is a script for it, but cdktf-cli is not added to the dependencies, so it still requires the cli to be installed globally to work.

Def agree it would be weird to have a package.json for other projects. Maybe the default for those is a bash script, or something language specific, that runs a determined cli version using npx? It looks like y'all already assume most people will install it via npm, so shouldn't be much different, other than not having to install it globally.

[acdoussan]

Also, you can run it with npx like that, but it still requires the package to be installed. Usually npx scripts don't require things to be installed to run.

Example output I get:

$ npx cdktf-cli@0.14.0 --version
Need to install the following packages:
  cdktf-cli@0.14.0
Ok to proceed? (y)