live-deps

Work with your dependencies locally and see the changes in your app live, like npm link but better.

What?

TODO

Why?

TODO

Installation

npm i live-deps --save-dev

Usage

⚠️ Prerequisites and caveats ⚠️

• You still need to publish your package to npm (or your own private register / by using a tool like yalc) at least once + everytime a change to your package dependencies is performed.

  The reason for this is that during a npm i the package will always try to reinstall from a real location. That means your symlink may be overwritte and any new dependencies you added to your symlinked version will not be detected.

• Symlinks needs to be resolved correctly by Webpack and TypeScript, for Webpack this means setting resolve.symlinks to false and for TypeScript setting preserveSymlinks: true in tsconfig.json.

---

In your package.json add the following:

"liveDependencies": {
  "your-package-name": "..\\your-package-name"
},

If you package requires transpiling make sure to run it in watch mode:

For example:

tsc --watch

Then in your consuming project run the command:

npx live-deps link

This will symlink all the folders in the folder of your package except the node_modules folder. Currently it will not symlink and files in the root of your project which means you should have your final source code end up in a dist folder etc.

By avoiding symlinking your node_modules we simulate a real install in a better way and avoid problems like dual versions of React etc being loaded causing runtime errors.