Why expo-cli must be installed globally?

Question

The official way of working with expo-cli is to install it globally, see https://docs.expo.io/get-started/installation/#installing-expo-cli:

Installing Expo CLI

# Install command line tools
npm install --global expo-cli

However, I never found any explanation about why it is supposed to be global (other than that this simplifies the initial expo init command). To my thinking, having a global package undermines the whole idea behind npm and local node_modules. Essentially, expo-cli is a direct dependency of the project. It's used for running the dev version with expo start and also for creating production builds.

Different versions of expo-cli will work differently, they may even expect different values in app.config.ts. That means it's not safe to upgrade expo-cli globally for one project and then return working with an older project which has been created and maintained with an older version of (global) expo-cli.

None of this would have happened if expo-cli were a normal local project dependency like expo (the SDK package).

So, my question is: is there a real reason for keeping expo-cli global? What do I lose if I move it to local project dependencies? How come Expo documentation never even mentions such option?

Unpaged

I'm curious what the answer is on this if you find it. I can't get the latest version of expo-cli to work if installed locally to my package, it can only work globally. I was able to use it locally previously. – Astigmia

I've simply installed it as a devDepedency and everything works fine so far. – Volley

Answer 1

In Expo SDK 46 they introduced a new “Local Expo CLI”.

However, this was possibly because of the fact that if you don't have or delete the "node_modules" directory, you can't reinstall with "expo install".

Mcdavid

Although this doesn't really fully answer the original question, I'm marking this accepted as it explains straight to the point why the original question is now outdated and irrelevant. – Unpaged