Fix mismatching tsc binary versions in expo-module-scripts in monorepos

[peter-jozsa]

Why

If you have a monorepo in which you have different versions of typescript installed you may see that expo-module build plugin fails because of unknown TS compiler options. I think it happens because wrong version of tsc picked up by npx.

Related GitHub issues:
npm/cli#6765

How

As far as I understand the root cause of this issue is that if we simply run npx tsc ... npm does not know tsc binary belongs to the typescript package and it will simply try to resolve it from the root workspace's node_modules/.bin where it will find the wrong version of tsc because of dependency hoisting. It should start looking up tsc in the workspace's node_modules/.bin (from where we're executing expo-module build plugin) but that is not the case for some reason. We can only achieve this by giving a hint to npx that tsc belongs to the package called typescript. In this case it will start the binary lookup from the workspace's node_modules/.bin folder and use the correct version to build our module plugin.

Test Plan

1. Create a Yarn v2 Berry monorepo.
2. Create a module (packages/cool-module) by following the official tutorial with a config plugin (https://docs.expo.dev/modules/config-plugin-and-native-module-tutorial/)
3. Add typescript@^4.5.5 to your workspace root as a dev dependency (or add you could have multiple other workspaces that depend on typescript@^4.5.5, e.g. packages/my-api)
4. At this point you should see that the 4.5.5 tsc is installed in your root node_modules and 5.3.0 tsc is installed in your packages/cool-module/node_modules folder.
5. If you try to run cd packages/cool-module && yarn run build plugin you should receive TypeScript config errors since packages/cool-module/plugin/tsconfig.json inherits configuration options that are unknown to 4.5.5 tsc. (e.g. "lib": ["es2023"]). At this point you know something is wrong since expo-module-scripts depends on typescript": "^5.1.3" that should be aware of es2023 and node16 module resolution logic.
6. Go to your module workspace folder (cd packages/cool-module) and execute the same command that is executed by expo-module build plugin under the hood: yarn exec -- npx tsc --version. It should give the mismatched 4.5.5 version.
7. Stay in the module workspace folder (packages/cool-module) and execute now the following command: yarn exec -- npx --package=typescript tsc --version. It should give the correct 5.3.0 version.

Checklist

• Documentation is up to date to reflect these changes (eg: https://docs.expo.dev and README.md).
• Conforms with the Documentation Writing Style Guide
• This diff will work correctly for npx expo prebuild & EAS Build (eg: updated a module plugin).

[ide]

I'll need some time to review this more closely but wanted to say what a great PR summary this is, explaining the motivation and providing your test plan.

[ide]

We had to revert this change. See the linked revert PR. From the description it sounds like npx --package xxx will look for xxx in your global packages, hence needing to revert.