npx command not found when calling exec in test

[jonasmerlin]

Hey, so I'm trying to run my integration tests in parallel against a real DB. For this, I'm using a different schema for each of my test files. Each of these needs to be migrated to reflect my schema. Since I'm using prisma, where migrate is only a CLI command, I try to run it via execSync() from node's own child_process module. So, all in all, this is roughly what I'm doing:

test.before(async (t) => {
  const dbUrl = `postgresql://admin:test@localhost:5432/db?schema=pluginPrisma&connection_limit=1`;

  execSync("npx prisma migrate dev", {
    env: {
      DATABASE_URL: dbUrl,
    },
  });

  // ... rest of before
}

But I'm getting the following error when running my tests:

  before hook

  Rejected promise returned by test. Reason:

  Error {
    output: [
      null,
      Buffer @Uint8Array [],
      Buffer @Uint8Array [
        2f62696e 2f73683a 206e7078 3a20636f 6d6d616e 64206e6f 7420666f 756e640a
      ],
    ],
    pid: 7087,
    signal: null,
    status: 127,
    stderr: Buffer @Uint8Array [
      2f62696e 2f73683a 206e7078 3a20636f 6d6d616e 64206e6f 7420666f 756e640a
    ],
    stdout: Buffer @Uint8Array [],
    message: `Command failed: npx prisma migrate dev␊
    /bin/sh: npx: command not found␊
    `,
  }

  › /bin/sh: npx: command not found
  › __tests__/plugins/prisma.test.ts:12:11

  ─

Same goes for running npm run <something> . But running stuff like ls works!

I'm using ava 4.0.1 and guess this has something to do with the thread isolation. Any ideas on how to work around this?

Thanks!

[novemberborn]

My guess is that the way you provide the env object your other environment variables may not be passed through, meaning that PATH is empty and the child process can't find npx. ls is built-in so works. I don't expect this to be related to the worker threads.

[jonasmerlin]

Thanks for your quick answer. This is exactly what was happening, of course. Thank you!