Change temp directory

[harryhorton]

Feature request

Enable users to change the location of the .temp directory for the build process.

What problem does this feature solve?

I'm attempting to run VuePress within Google Cloud functions where the node_modules folder is readonly. Based on the errors I'm getting, it looks like VuePress is attempting to make use of a temp directory within node_modules, rather than in the src or dist locations.

What does the proposed API look like?

For the cli vuepress build --dist .vuepress/dist --temp /tmp/vuepresstemp /tmp/client/

Though an extra configuration option would be helpful as well.

How should this be implemented in your opinion?

Are you willing to work on this yourself?**

With some general direction, I'd be happy to make a PR.

[meteorlxy]

If this feature is approved, we can make some modification based on #354 to achieve it

[ycmjason]

👍

I think it makes perfect sense to use an OS temp directory. Is there any reason why we haven't been using it?

Instead of /tmp, perhaps we can use os.tmpdir().

[harryhorton]

To be clear about my intentions, I'm attempting to build in cloud functions pulling .md content from firestore as a weird sort of compiled CMS experiement. The compiled files can then either be pushed to hosting, or to storage with hosting rules to points to the files.

I was able to get it to work by:

• copying /srv/node_modules/vuepress to /tmp/alt_modules/vuepress.
• Creating a symlink for /tmp/node_modules to /srv/node_modules //the real one
• Running build from node /tmp/alt_modules/vuepress/bin/vuepress.js build /tmp/client

This allowed me to use vuepress in a writable directory while still using the installed node packages (node will walk up directories until it finds a node_modules folder and use packages from there).

None of that would be necessary if we could explicitly control the temp directory for VuePress.