First, everything works as expected on my local machine (macOS), but I’m getting errors when running it on CI (GitHub workflow) on Ubuntu.

My package uses a devDependency with an executable script that, in turn, uses another dependency with an executable script.

• Project
  • devDep A // a dev dependency that includes a bin script
    • dep B // a dependency that includes a bin script

When running the devDep A bin script (with npx <command-a> ...), which internally runs the dep B bin script (with npx <command-b> ...), I get the error could not determine executable to run.

From the logs on CI, it appears that it tries to fetch command-b from the npm registry and then attempts to run a bin script within the package it finds—which that package doesn’t have, leading to the error.

As I understand it, npm should try to find the npx command in the local node_modules, then in the global environment, and only if it doesn’t find it would it attempt to fetch it from the npm registry. So, I assume the issue is that npm can’t find command-b, and therefore it tries to fetch it from the npm registry.

Note: Running command-a with an option that doesn’t rely on command-b works as expected.

Here is the workflow file

name: Run tests

on:
  pull_request:
  push:
    branches:
      - main

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
    concurrency: ci-${{ github.ref }}-${{ github.workflow }}

    steps:
      - name: Checkout repository
        uses: actions/checkout@v3

      # Install node
      - uses: actions/setup-node@v4
        with:
          node-version: "20"

      # Install pnpm
      - uses: pnpm/action-setup@v4
        with:
          version: 8.9.0

      - name: Install dependencies and run tests
        run: |
          cd examples/my-project
          pnpm install
          pnpm run test

pnpm run test runs the command-a script that relies on command-b

Note: tried with both npm and pnpm – nothing works.

I am not sure where the problem is, but since it works on my local environment, I suspect it is something with GH CI / Ubuntu / nested npx commands