Plugins don't work when installed globally?

[ivokund]

I’m a bit confused by these two facts:

• serverless is usually installed and works fine as a global npm package
• serverless plugins need to be installed locally and do not work when installed with -g flag (see https://github.com/amplify-education/serverless-domain-manager/issues/162)

Also see: https://github.com/serverless/serverless/issues/3319

I’m absolutelly fine with defining my plugins in serverless.yml, but as I’m not using nodejs in my project at all, having a package.json and node_modules in my local installation just to be able to run a serverless plugin seems a bit unnecessary.

Is there any particular reason why plugins should not work when installed globally?
Thanks for any clarification.

[buggy]

You can exclude the package.json and node_modules from your package using the package exclude option in your serverless.yml.

Personally, I install everything locally so each service is using the correct version of Serverless.

[monigala]

Installing locally isn’t a great solution. If you use lambda layers for node_modules then you’ll almost certainly run into this:

Unzipped size must be smaller than 262144000 bytes (Service: AWSLambdaInternal; Status Code: 400; Error Code: InvalidParameterValueException; Request ID: ; Proxy: null)