Yarn: Generating a complete lock-file without installing

[the-spyke]

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

Feature

What is the current behavior?

yarn generate-lock-entry emits a file with only root dependencies.

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

What is the expected behavior?

To have a command/option for emitting a complete lock-file like with yarn install.

Please mention your node.js, yarn and operating system version.

Yarn: 1.6.0

[the-spyke]

npm has npm install --package-lock-only command for this.

[BYK]

I like the idea. Shouldn't be too hard to implement.

[deifactor]

I found myself needing this today as well. Would this be a difficult thing to implement?

[pauldraper]

Wow, a feature that npm has that yarn doesn't. Must be a first :)

[runfaj]

A few other sites ask why this is necessary. In my case, I need to generate the lockfile because one of the dependencies of some package is failing to build, so I can't install. However I can't trace it down without having a lockfile to show what those dependencies are.

[sesam]

This would be awesome for when you keep your yarn.lock tracked in git, but build your app inside Docker. Without this feature, you always have a useless node_modules folder.

Following https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44438303/is-it-possibile-to-generate-a-yarn-lock-file-without-installing-the-packages you could perhaps work around this with:

npm install --package-lock-only; yarn import; rm package-lock.json

[ratoi-crysty]

@sesam wouldn't this have the issues of creating a different lockfile compared to generating it through yarn install?
From what I know, yarn and npm handles the dependencies tree a bit different (granted that the differences are really small).
I've seen cases where yarn installs different versions of dependencies compared to npm, therefore creating a different yarn.lock each time you generate it through install vs import from package-lock.json.
Having this in mind, I still think that this feature is required in yarn, as there is no true alternative to it, besides installing all the dependencies and the delete the node_modules folder.