Node.js Yarn’ing for Local Packages
Known for his open source and JavaScript security initiatives, Liran Tal is an award-winning software developer, security researcher, and open source champion in the JavaScript community. He's an internationally recognized GitHub Star, acknowledged for his open source advocacy, and has received the OpenJS Foundation's Pathfinder for Security for his work on Node.js security. His contributions to developer security education include leading OWASP projects, building supply chain security tools, participation in CNCF and OpenSSF initiatives, and authoring books such as O'Reilly's Serverless Security. He leads the developer advocacy team at Snyk.io and is on a mission to empower developers with better application security skills.
Feb 8, 2017 ~ 2 min read
Node.js Yarn’ing for Local Packages
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This is not another praise for npm package management with Yarn but rather a concise recipe for working with locally developed packages.
npm modules begin their lives when you init them on your local dev machine, but there comes a point when you want to test them out or plain use them with other Node.js projects you have.
With the npm client we’d be creating a link in the filesystem, but with Yarn you can really manage their versioning and use them just like any other dependency with all rules applied for dependencies.
Modules on the Filesystem: yarn add file://
Use the following command to add a package from the filesystem:
yarn add file:/Users/lirantal/code/my-npm-module
Good to keep in mind when doing that:
- Because Yarn treats this as a real dependency it means it will really install it to your local _node_modules/_ directory, so if you make changes on the npm module, they won’t be reflected on the installed version you have in the Node.js project.
- Yarn loves cache and it also caches those local npm modules, you can force a re-install by doing:
// Remove the package and clean local cache
yarn remove my-npm-mdule
yarn cache clean
// Re-install it
yarn add file:/…
Modules on Github / Git
Another thing that comes in handy with Yarn is that you can push your npm modules to a Git repository and tell Yarn to use that. This is useful if you don’t want to submit the npm package to an npm repository.
this is not specific to Yarn and the npm client can do the same
If you have a package on GitHub you can tell Yarn to install it using:
yarn add git+ssh://git@github.com/lirantal/my-npm-module.git
The same caching and versioning applies here as it did for the filesystem install.
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