How can I detect if corepack is already enabled?

[styfle]

If we were to programmatically enable corepack, we would want to disable after the work is complete.

However, if the user already had corepack enabled, then we wouldn't want to disable it.

Is there a way to get the current state to determine if its already enabled?

[arcanis]

Can you detail more the use case you have in mind?

[styfle]

Basically this PR:

• [cli] Add experimental corepack support vercel/vercel#7871

Since corepack is changing global bins, we don't want to run corepack disable if the user had already enabled it. We only want to disable if we were the ones to enable it, thus leaving the user's system in the original state when we're done.

[arcanis]

You can detect whether you're running within a Corepack context by checking if COREPACK_ROOT is set in the env, cf here.

That said, for your own use case, I wonder if perhaps the absolute no-risks option wouldn't be to just enable corepack in a temporary folder which you'd add to the PATH of your subshells, and just optionally cleanup at the end of the execution?

[styfle]

Yeah that sounds good, how would I do that? 🙂

[merceyz]

The enable command allows you to specify where it should install the binaries.

corepack enable --install-directory="/tmp/random-directory"

https://github.com/nodejs/corepack/tree/2b7180eff8635bc344fdde2c7d12ffa0eac14b49#corepack-enable--name

[styfle]

Thanks! The combination of --install-directory and COREPACK_HOME will work 👍