Yarn: workspaces "bin" symlinks not created for sub-dependencies

[chrisblossom]

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

What is the current behavior?
Yarn Workspaces do not create node_modules/.bin symlinks for nested dependencies that have a bin specified in their package.json.

Original Yarn issue: https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/issues/2874

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

Create yarn workspace
Create two workspace packages, one and two
Add two as a dependency to one
Add eslint as a dependency to two

Example: chrisblossom/yarn-issue-4964

What is the expected behavior?
one/node_modules/.bin/eslint symlink exists

Please mention your node.js, yarn and operating system version.
node 8.9.1
Yarn 1.3.2
OSX 10.13.1

[rally25rs]

Related: #4543
Caused by #4730

[klaasman]

Is there a temporary workaround for this issue?

[tothandras]

@klaasman You can create a symlink to the root node_modules/.bin as a workaround:

$ cd packages/foo
$ mkdir node_modules
$ ln -s ../../../node_modules/.bin ./node_modules

I hope a fix will come soon though... Whenever I switch to yarn I find some blocking bug that forces me to go back to npm.

[alexeyraspopov]

Another workaround: go back to the root, rm -rf node_modules and do yarn install. This installs everything back and links necessary .bin files to workspaces.

[alexeyraspopov]

Based on this workaround, it seems that the issue is caused by how PackageLinker works during yarn add in a workspace vs root yarn install. Maybe related to hoisting, @rally25rs?

[alexeyraspopov]

And worth mentioning, linking does not happen by just yarn install if node_modules are present.

[GAumala]

Hello, @alexeyraspopov thanks for posting that workaround, it does solve this issue at least partially for me.

I have 4 packages in my workspace, I deleted every single node_modules directory and ran yarn --frozen-lockfile. .bin files are installed for all packages except one. This might be due to the fact that this particular package has only one dependency with a binary, and the workspace has different versions of this package.

Can you please give me any hints on how to debug this by myself? Maybe I should start with src/package-linker.js?

[josh08h]

Any movement on this?

Only direct dependencies have their bin symlinked from local node_modules/.bin to the root node_modules/.bin.

> yarn -v
1.7.0

I would expect yarn to symlink all transitive dependency bins _and_ direct dependency bins to the root level node_modules/.bin dir.

[NE-SmallTown]

Any update on this?

[btakita]

I had to create a postinstall script that traverses all of the packages*/bin/* files in the repo & symlinks the files into the node_modules/.bin directory.

Of course, I'd love for this bug to be fixed, but here's the hack in the meantime...

#/bin/sh
DIR="$(pwd)"
pushd node_modules/.bin
DIR__BIN="$(pwd)"
# In the case of a git submodule which is also a monorepo
for f in $(find $DIR/packages/*/packages/*/bin/*); do
    ln -sf "$(realpath --relative-to="$(pwd)" "$f")"
done
for f in $(find $DIR/packages/*/bin/*); do
    ln -sf "$(realpath --relative-to="$(pwd)" "$f")"
done
popd

[FezVrasta]

I'm trying to understand how is Facebook able to use Yarn in production with these bugs... Is anyone from the team aware of this problem? #4730 doesn't seem to have fixed it

[mattfysh]

This seems like the correct behaviour to me. packages/one has not declared a dependency on eslint and therefore should not be given access to the eslint CLI.

If you want to use eslint in the packages/one folder a dependency must be declared. Otherwise you could create a brittle connection between one and the private, internal implementation of two

Can you point to an example of how this works in a non-workspaces setup?

[dizel3d]

nohoist in a root package.json helps me:

"workspaces": {
  "nohoist": [
    "**/eslint"
  ]
},

The same for a child package.json:

"workspaces": {
  "nohoist": [
    "eslint"
  ]
},

[kirill-konshin]

If you use Lerna simple trick is to add following to your package.json:

{
  "postinstall": "lerna link"
}

P.S. Side note, keep in mind that after this your monorepo packages will be linked twice (assume packageB requires packageA:

• node_modules
  
  
  
  • packageA — first link by Yarn
  
  
• packageA — source
• packageB
  
  
  
  • node_modules
  
  
  • packageA — second link by Lerna
  
  

[trusktr]

@kirill-konshin Interesting. I wonder which sort of symlinking is better? Is the benefit of hoisting only for speed of setup time?

[kirill-konshin]

@trusktr the thing is that not all tools are smart enough to find the binaries at the top level.

[swernerx]

FYI: I build a little tool on top of Lerna to link binaries offered by packages to the top level .bin folder. This makes it possible to use e.g. shared CI tools from a package. (We need this to be implemented that way because other users of the tool outside of the mono repo rely on it as well).

https://github.com/sebastian-software/link-lerna-package-binaries