Documentation on how to use npm package in development

[queenvictoria]

Hi there. I'm wondering if others have this issue: we fork lucide, create a branch, make a new icon, and, possibly, submit a PR.

Regardless of whether we think the icon has wider appeal, we now need to start using the new package.

As a monorepo, with intermediate build steps, it wasn't clear to me how to go about using the new package (lucide-vue in our case). I've been around the world in the last week trying different methods to get this working.

What doesn't work

• Adding the git repo to package.json. For example npm install queenvictoria/lucide#cool-icon. As there is no build step and the package is nested into packages/lucide-vue.
• Using gitpkg service on the sub directory as the build steps occur in the root directory of lucide.

What does work-ish

Add a postinstall step to your projects package.json (and removing lucide-vue from dependencies). I read this StackOverflow answer right at the very beginning of this journey and dismissed it as too complicated. However it does work and, in the end, not so complicated.

  "scripts": {
    "build:lucide-vue": "mkdir build_modules && cd build_modules && git clone git@github.com:queenvictoria/lucide.git && cd lucide && git checkout cool-icon && yarn install && yarn workspace lucide build && yarn workspace lucide-vue build && cd ../../ && npm install build_modules/lucide/packages/lucide-vue",
    "postinstall": "npm run build:lucide-vue"
  },

Why -ish?

So this works well locally. I am still working on our deploy system to to bring it in to production. There are currently a couple of failures:

1. npm WARN lifecycle [repo]@[version]~postinstall: cannot run in wd [repo]@[version] npm run build:lucide-vue (wd=/usr/src/app)
2. WARN Module lucide-vue/nuxt not found. Please ensure lucide-vue/nuxt is in devDependencies and installed. HINT: During build step, for npm/yarn, NODE_ENV=production or --production should NOT be used.

To resolve 1) I've added (to our Dockerfile) RUN npm set unsafe-perm true. Now it looks like build:lucide-vue gets called many times (possibly in a loop) which causes a timeout during our build step (currently 20 minutes)

What next?

I'd really like to understand if there is a proscribed method for doing this. And or that this be added to the documentation (perhaps in contributing). Or, if it's already there, apologies!

[Rogdham]

A possible solution would be to use the patch-package lib if the changes are not too big. Probably not the answer you were looking for, but a workaround.

It goes like this: you commit patches fo some libraries into your repo, and patch-package makes sure to apply the patches when needed (e.g. during install).