Install JavaScript dependencies with your plugin

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You can expand your plugin’s functionality by installing dependencies from the npm package repository. You can install new dependencies by defining a package.json file^[1] in the same directory as your myst.yml^[2], and running npm install.

Here’s an example package.json file that includes the js-yaml package, which is a YAML parser.

package.json

{
  "dependencies": {
    "js-yaml": "^4.1.0"
  }
}

By running npm install, we see:

$ npm install
added 2 packages, and audited 3 packages in 898ms

found 0 vulnerabilities

You can then use the js-yaml package in your plugin code by importing it.

For example, the following JavaScript snippet uses the js-yaml package and the fs package (already built into JavaScript) to load YAML data from a file.

my_plugin.mjs

import yaml from "js-yaml";
import fs from "fs";

// Read and parse team data
const someData = yaml.load(fs.readFileSync("data.yml", "utf8"));

Note that any plugins will be run from the root of the project, so set your file paths accordingly.

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Footnotes¶

For more information about package.json files, see the Node.js documentation and the MDN package documentation.
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In fact, you can define a new package.json for each custom plugin, by defining your plugins in their own folders. There is little benefit to doing this, though.
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