Installing a local optionalDependency leads to an non-existing file error

[kristian]

Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?

Bug

What is the current behavior?

When installing a package with yarn, which has an optionalDependency to a local file, which is non-existant then yarn install fails with an error:

package.json

...
"optionalDependencies": {
   "anything_local": "file:./nonexistent_folder"
}
...

Leads to the error:

error Package "anything_lcocal" refers to a non-existing file '".../nonexsistent_folder"'.

If the current behavior is a bug, please provide the steps to reproduce.

yarn install any package with on optional local dependency which the folder does not exist.

What is the expected behavior?

As the dependency is optional anyways, the expected behaviour would be that only a warning, is logged and the install command ends with an success.

[graphan]

I would go even further and make it work also for dependencies:

...
"dependencies": {
   "react-native-webview": "file:./../node_modules/react-native-webview"
}
...

Why?

Because it is a very important feature for linking React Native Libraries.
Let's imagine that you have the following folders structure:

- components
- native_app
- node_modules

If node_modules contains a React Native Library hoisted from components and native_app contains a React Native App, then you can link the library with the app running:
cd native_app && react-native link react-native-webview

But, this will only work when we keep package.json as above. That means that this is a vicious cycle, because during installation "file:./../node_modules/react-native-webview" is not existent yet.

Thus, I think it is a very important feature to provide a way to bypass checking local files in general, not only for optionalDependencies.

[GitPaulo]

I'm having the same issue. Having this feature would help a lot when working with libraries that require local dependencies during development.

[celeroncoder]

I'm having the same issue. It happened with downloading the Prisma client which led to the following error:

error Package "chokidar2" refers to a non-existing file '"root/chokidar2"'.

I deleted the node_modules directory and rerun the command but having the same exact issue/

[debragail]

I'm having this issue as well with yarn install

yarn install
<1s
+ yarn install
yarn install v1.22.19
[1/4] Resolving packages...
error Package "components" refers to a non-existing file '"/opt/atlassian/pipelines/agent/build/components/dist"'.
info Visit https://yarnpkg.com/en/docs/cli/install for documentation about this command.

[kristian]

This was meanwhile answered by @arcanis in yarnpkg/berry#4306 (comment), Yarn actually requires to resolve optional dependencies for reasons of a consistent resolution. Checkout https://github.com/kristian/yarn-plugin-better-optional for a potential workaround. I have never tested it with local files though.