Do not append, instead clobber.

[jordwalke]

I found it much more useful in my fork of npm-hooks, to clobber instead of append the file. Do you agree this should be a supported mode?

[mikkoh]

Yep you're probably right. Could allow clobbering via option. Not sure what the default should be.

I haven't used this module in awhile. Initially I was wanting to create a module that would track installed modules. A sort of analytics module.

[jordwalke]

I found an incredibly important use case for this (or hooks in general). We created a far superior postinstall for the purpose of architecture specific compilation, but it could be used for any build step in postinstall. It's called esy.

• Parallel builds among all packages.
• Caches artifacts across projects (important for native compilation which takes minutes/hours).
• Recoverable builds.
• Out of source builds - doesn't touch your actual node_modules and write artifacts into them.

Here's what the package.json would look like:

{
  "name": "testtop",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "scripts": {
    "install": "esybuild"
  },
  "esy": {
    "build": ["your commands here"]
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "esy": "*"
  }
}

Here's where I use my fork of this library to do that. What it does is, it attaches a hook to ensure that only the top level package's post install runs, which kicks of the parallel builds from the top down in a system we control, not npm.

Notice how it just looks like you're running esybuild on install - which you are, but that's not the real build :D