Make local-dev-lib a peerdependancy

[camden11]

Context

Previously, both hubspot-cli and cli-lib used the cli-lib/config module to interact with the hubspot.config.yml file. The config module stores information about the config file in a global variable called __config. We recently introduced hubspot-local-dev-lib as a dependency to the CLI. Many modules within local-dev-lib also need to interact with config files, and as local-dev-lib is itself a port of cli-lib, it also provides its own config module with its own instance of __config. Having two separate instances of __config causes bugs, so in an attempt to remedy this, we added local-dev-lib as a dep to cli-lib and deferred to its instance of __config. Unfortunately things were not so simple. hubspot-cli's dependancies on hubspot-local-dev-lib look something like this:

• node_modules/@hubspot/local-dev-lib
• node_modules/@hubspot/clli-lib/node_modules/local-dev-lib

This works, but only if both hubspot-cli and cli-lib use the same version of @hubspot-local-dev-lib. There are many ways for versions between the two to get out of whack, resulting in two separate __config instances and causing bugs. Our solution is to switch local-dev-lib to a peerDependency within the CLI. Peer dependencies are a feature of npm that allow you to stipulate that package A requires package B, but will not install the dependency on its own. Instead, any package C that has a dependency on package A must also have a dependency on package B. By using them, we can assure that package A (cli-lib) uses the same package B (local-dev-lib) as package C (hubspot-cli).

The only side effect is that now, any package with a dependency on cli-lib must also explicitly specify a dependency on local-dev-lib in its package.json. We will have to do a major release to make this change

Some more info on peerDependencies, since we didn't know much about them prior to running into this problem

• https://nodejs.org/en/blog/npm/peer-dependencies
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZosDFmHW-CQ

Who to Notify

@brandenrodgers

[brandenrodgers]

Thanks for the thorough explanation 🙏