NodeJS spawn process that is an alias

Question

I'm trying to spawn a process from nodejs, with spawn from child_process. But the command I'm trying to run is an alias inside the .bashrc file of the running user.

// index.ts or whatever
import { spawn } from "child_process";

spawn('cmdAlias', [args], {
  env: process.env,
  stdio: 'inherit',
  shell: '/bin/bash'
});

// .bashrc
[...]
alias cmdAlias='echo foo'

This doesn't work, it throws a command not found (cmdAlias).

If I try to reconfigure bash manually by running:

// index.ts or whatever
import { spawn } from "child_process";

spawn('source $HOME/.bashrc; cmdAlias', [args], {
  env: process.env,
  stdio: 'inherit',
  shell: '/bin/bash'
});

Then I get source command not found!

There a way to spawn a process with the aliases loaded?

(note the alias works from terminal, that's a given)

PS: oversimplified examples here

Answer 1

I tried these steps on my OS and it worked:

1. execute nano ~/.bashrc
2. Add alias cmdAlias='echo foo' to .bashrc
3. Now locate to your project and create these two files there

// ./cmdAliasWrapper
#!/bin/bash
echo "Running cmdAliasWrapper.sh"
bash -i -c "cmdAlias $*"
exit 1

// ./test.js
const spawn = require('child_process').spawn;

const args = [
    "echo 'This ran from test.js'"
];

spawn('./cmdAliasWrapper.sh', args, {
    env: process.env,
    stdio: 'inherit',
    shell: '/bin/bash'
  });

4. Execute chmod +x ./cmdAliasWrapper.sh
5. And finally node ./test.js

Now you should see this on your console:

Running cmdAliasWrapper.sh
echo foo This ran from test.js

Edit: We can do the same operation without a .sh file:

// ./test.js
const spawn = require('child_process').spawn;

const args = [
    "-i",
    "-c",
    "cmdAlias 'This ran from test.js'"
];

spawn('bash', args, {
    env: process.env,
    stdio: 'inherit',
    shell: '/bin/bash'
});