Allow specifying `PRISMA_SKIP_POSTINSTALL_GENERATE` in .npmrc

[invakid404]

Problem

Currently, there's no way to disable Prisma's postinstall script globally in a project, meaning I need to specify PRISMA_SKIP_POSTINSTALL_GENERATE every time I npm install.

Suggested solution

Allowing users to specify PRISMA_SKIP_POSTINSTALL_GENERATE in .npmrc would be a good way of solving this issue. Essentially, this is achieved by checking for the npm_config_* counterpart of the environment variable in question.

Alternatives

Not aware of any.

Additional context

I took this idea from other big Node.js packages, such as Cypress: this is their implementation of this feature.

[janpio]

Interesting. Is this a common approach to allow configuration via .npmrc?

[invakid404]

I've seen this done in many different Node projects, so I'd say it's a common approach. I don't really have the data to back this claim up at hand, but Cypress is one of the biggest projects that does this and that I can think of as an example.

[janpio]

This seems to work by .npmrc by default being read into the env with a prefix, so tooling can just use this and use it additionally to the real env var. Some related Cypress tests: https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/blob/d6f356f561a5ebdc42ee80632c2daf6990760c9d/cli/test/lib/util_spec.js#L450-L464

This is interesting because of course you can already persist environment variables and their values in a .env file. But .npmrc might feel a bit more common and accepted, vs .env where the explicit guidance often is that it should not be committed to Git. On the other hand, having those values come from Npm configuration might be unexpected as well. I certainly would have a hard time to debug and understand this.