npm has become an essential part of my tool-chain, and I often use the scripts entry in lieu of build tools like Gulp or Grunt for small to medium sized projects. One issue that I've encountered is wanting to kick off tasks stored in the scripts without actually running npm on the shell. Googling did not lead to any easy answers, but the solution was readily apparent from the npm-cli source.

Once you have installed npm locally npm i npm --save [insert "Yo dawg..." reference here] or by using the global-npm (thanks @bfredit for the tip), you can require and use it:

var npm = require('npm');

npm.load({}, (er) => {
  if (er) { return; }

  npm.commands.run(['test'], (runEr, output) => {
    console.log(runEr, output)
  });

  // additional args can be passed as well
  npm.commands.run(['example', 'aditional', 'arg'], (runEr, output) => {
    console.log(runEr, output)
  });
});

This is obviously a very simplistic use case, but hopefully it provides some food for thought. Let me know if you are able to build something interesting with it.