@naturalcycles/linked

npm link for TypeScript projects.

Problem

npm link is good, but TypeScript projects require a build step (transpilation from *.ts to *.js), otherwise your project will use stale *.js files.

Running compile/watch in a separate terminal is an extra step, which may fail and again result in stale .js file being used. One terminal window with watcher needed for each linked project.

Problem 2

Sometimes you want to create a universal module, to be consumed by both Node and Browser.

You will have a hard choice to define a tsconfig compilation target.

For Node you want it high, e.g es2018. You don't want to transpile down e.g async/await, cause it creates weird stacktraces, compared to native stacktraces with es2018.

For Browser you want to be safe and transpile down to es2015 or even es5 (really?). This means, e.g transpiling down async/await and getting weird stacktraces in Node as a result.

Isn't it better if you can just publish source files (*.ts in this case) and let the target project decide how to transpile it?

Solution

You may have your dependencies in 2 modes:

unlinked mode (default)
linked mode (similar to npm link)

Projects are installed under /src/@linked.

In linked mode - symlink is created from the source dir of your project (e.g ../../SomeProject).

In unlinked mode - files are copied from node_modules/SomeProject.

API

yarn linked - enable linked mode

yarn unlinked - disable linked mode

yarn linked postinstall - needs to be called in your project's postinstall AND after each yarn upgrade of linked project.

@naturalcycles/linked