Is it possible to use a custom TestCafé browser provider without using NPM?

Question

I need to create a custom browser provider for TestCafé (which is actually quite easy) and want to just store it as part of my project and reference it locally. But, it looks like TestCafé has hard-coded both the naming convention of their browser provider plugins AND the loading of those plugins.

The instructions on developing a new browser provider are here but mention no way of using locally outside of active plugin development and seems to imply the expected behavior is to publish to NPM.

Hard-coded name source code and hard-coded require source code.

Answer 1

You are right, both naming convention and the loading approach are hard-coded.

From what I gather, you don't want your plug-in to be available publicly on npm. However, you don't have to publish your plug-in to npm to use it. You can create a local symlink and reference your plug-in locally by calling the 'npm link' command described in the same topic you referenced:

Using the Provider Development Version.