npm install fails after cloning a repo

[michalczaplinski]

Expected behavior

npm install should succeed

Observed behavior

npm fails with the following error:

Steps involved to reproduce the problem

git clone git@github.com:frontity/frontity.git
cd frontity
npm install

Info about your system

node version 15
npm version 7.6.0

Possible solution

not yet clear

[michalczaplinski]

Running the contents of the build script of the @frontity/frontity package before running npm i at the root fixes the issue. Details:

Using the globally installed typescript I can run tsc --project ./tsconfig.build.json && cp -a templates dist/templates. Then, running npm i at the root succeeds.

The problem seems to be that lerna seems to try to run frontity somewhere before the @frontity/frontity package is built thus running into "no such file or directory" error.

[michalczaplinski]

After some more investigation, this is a bug in npm: npm/cli#3065

When npm tries to symlink the bin of the @frontity/frontity package it runs into this problem because the prepublish script was not run and thus the file does not exist.

---

Interestingly, the problem is a bit deeper than that. I can change the prepublish scripts in our packages to prepare and it still fails, albeit with a different error:

This would suggest that npm is still broken because it tries to run the prepublish script of @frontity/core before ensuring that all of its dependencies (in this case @frontity/file-settings have been built first.

I wasn't able to make a clean reproduction of this in a new repo to report to the npm team though. I might try again later on.

---

The simplest workaround for all of this for now would be to opt out of npm workspaces altogether by just deleting the:

"workspaces": [
  "packages/*"
]

in our root package.json. I've tested it and it seems to work fine.

@luisherranz You have added the npm workspaces to our main package.json file - is there some reason that I don't see for using them?

[luisherranz]

You have added the npm workspaces to our main package.json file - is there some reason that I don't see for using them?

I added them so npx changeset suggestions are only shown for the packages that can be released.

Changesets don't support lerna: changesets/changesets#130.

Without it, it makes suggestions for all package.json found:

So it is not really required. We can remove it for now. I'll make a PR 🙂

[michalczaplinski]

ok nice! I think that changesets should support lerna now. They switched to using @manypkg/get-packages which has support for lerna.

[luisherranz]

Good to know 👍 🙂