yarn ignores existing project package.json

[eurochriskelly]

I've been using yarn happily for a while. For most things, it's pretty much a drop-in replacement for npm. However, it behaves very differently if you are working in folders other than the project root. This is unintuitive, unlike npm in a bad way, and results in multiple package.json files peppered throughout the source, all needing to be maintained separately.

For example, let's say my package.json contains a "build" script. From a terminal, I run yarn run build or npm run build and both work as expected. Let's say I cd into directory"test/". npm run build still works but yarn run build complains that there is no package.json.

I would expect that running yarn run build would descend the tree until it finds a package.json file and then build the project as though in that directory (just like npm, gulp, and everything else). I suspect the cause is related to the fact that yarn add "conveniently" creates a package.json file for you if there is no package.json in the current directory, saving you the npm init step. Again, I think yarn add should only do this if it does not find a package.json when descending the tree.

This seems like an unintentional bug to me.

Using yarn version 0.20.1 and Windows 10.

[BYK]

Hey @eurochriskelly, sorry we missed this earlier. This is certainly a very important thing and we'll now prioritize it accordingly.

[BYK]

We may be able to use this code piece with minor changes: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/blob/master/src/config.js#L573

[BYK]

@torifat - Still working on this?

[torifat]

@BYK I spent some time working on this but couldn't finish it 😞. I have a few questions regarding how it should inside a workspace. I will try to discuss those in Discord.