npm-link-copy's Introduction

DEPRECATED: Please use npm-link-better

npm-link-copy

Alternative to npm link that works by copying files instead of linking.

Why?

Suppose you have the following setup:

/home
├───your-projects
│   └───some-project
├───your-npm-libs
│   └───your-awesome-module

Where some-project uses your-awesome-module.

While developing locally, you'd obviously want to make use of npm link

~/your-npm-libs/your-awesome-module $ npm link

~/your-projects/some-project $ npm link your-awesome-module

While this does link your-awesome-module inside some-project/node_modules and you can carry on as though it's actually installed, but internally node uses fs.realPath and therefore knows that your-awesome-module is actually in ~/your-npm-libs/your-awesome-module and not really in some-project/node_modules/your-awesome-module. This reflects in things like require calls or access to __dirname from your module or its dependencies which sometimes causes issues.

So to help with that, this tool actually copies your-awesome-module in some-project/node_modules/your-awesome-module and optionally keeps it updated (with --watch)

One downside is that you need to run it every time you make changes to your-awesome-module

Install

npm install -g laggingreflex/npm-link-copy

Usage

npm-link-copy [..modules] [options]

--watch, -w Watch for changes
--ignored, -i [defalut:['node_modules', '.git']] Ignored dirs

Libraries used

fs-extra: better fs
require-global-node-module: resolve from npm root -g
chokidar: better fs.watch
yargs: enhanced process.argv
debounce-queue prevent bursts of callbacks

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npm-link-copy's Issues

All files are emptied

I now you are thinking about a rewrite, but I just found a dangerous problem with npm-link-copy, so I'm creating this issue.

What I did

I first executed npm link my-dependency out of habbit, but then remembered that there is a better solution. So I also did npm-link-copy my-dependency.

Result

Then I got lots of errors, like this one:

[nlc] [error] [my-dependency] Cannot copy package.json ENOENT: no such file or directory, open '/home/user/.local/lib64/node_modules/my-dependency/package.json'

Also all the files in my-dependency are now empty. (Luckily .git was not touched though.)

Explanation

First I did not understand why all this is happening, but I think I found the reason.
npm link creates a link from ./node_modules/my-dependency to ~/.local/lib64/node_modules/my-dependency, which is itself a link to the development directory of my-dependency.
So when npm-link-copy tries to copy the files from ~/.local/lib64/node_modules/me-dependency, it will try to overwrite them with themselves.

laggingreflex / npm-link-copy Goto Github PK