prefer system installed protoc

[someone1]

We have a monorepo and use protoc for more than our web client which is why it's installed and configured in our development container systemwide. As such, the protoc installed into our node_modules/.bin folder from @protobuf-ts/plugin is getting priority in our build scripts and is missing a bunch of includes we rely on. Is there a way to disable installing this dependency and/or have a config option to prefer the system-wide installed version?

our "build" scripts are scripts defined in our package.json

[timostamm]

Thanks for the report. There is no built-in option to support this.

@protobuf-ts/protoc is already looking at the package.json. If pkg.config.protocVersion is set, it tries to install protoc in this version.

It should be possible to add a second key pkg.config.useProtocPath. If set, @protobuf-ts/protoc could execute protoc from this path, and not install it's own version at all.

Would this solve the issue?

[someone1]

Hmm - I think that'd be fine, I was otherwise thinking to auto-detect if protoc is already found in the $PATH (sans the node_modules/.bin directory) and use that before resorting to installing it.

[timostamm]

Agreed, preferring $PATH is better.

Users could opt out of $PATH and ensure installation by setting pkg.config.protocVersion explicitly.

I think this commit should do it. Do you have a way to test this?

[someone1]

just ran it, seems to have done the trick!

Thank you!

[timostamm]

👍

Released in v2.0.0-alpha.11

[gganley]

Hello,

Is it possible to backport this fix to v1.x?

[timostamm]

Could you try updating @protobuf-ts/protoc ?

npm i @protobuf-ts/protoc@next

This updates the "protoc" package only and keeps the 1.x version for everything else.

I am pretty sure that the new version of the "protoc" package should work just fine, but it would help a lot if you could confirm.

If this does not cause any problems, I can backport and publish as 1.x.

[gganley]

Yes that did work! Thanks for the help.