Working between yarn workspaces and other projects with peerDependencies

This repository is a meant to reproduce an issue we encountered in trying to work between a workspace and other repositories.

To be concrete, we have workspaces for components (more or less smart) and tooling separated in multiple packages, but "projects" are separate repositories and depends on packages from the workspace.

Note : We have created a npm package "log-version" that only console.log its current package version to demonstrate the issue.

The issue

We want to be able to dev on package-a while it is linked in project-a and always have the same results than in prod, when packages are taken from the registry for instance.

package-a belongs to the workspace and has a peerDependency on log-version ^1.0.0
package-b and package-c belongs to the workspace and both have a dependency on log-version@1.0.0

This makes log-version@1.0.0 be hoisted by the workspace

project-a has a dependency on log-version@1.1.0 and on package-a (version doesn't matter)

workspaces
  |-- node_modules
    |-- log-version@1.0.0
  |-- packages
    |-- package-a (peerDependency: log-version ^1.0.0)
    |-- package-b (dependency: log-version@1.0.0)
    |-- package-c (dependency: log-version@1.0.0)

project-a
  |-- node_modules
    |-- log-version@1.1.0
    |-- package-a
  package.json
    * dependency:
      - log-version@1.1.0
      - package-a

In dev

We link package-a in project-a and run project-a:

project-a has log-version@1.1.0 in dependency so uses version 1.1.0 when running
package-a has log-version ^1.0.0 in peerDependency so running in project-a, should use log-version@1.1.0

BUT, package-a in fact uses log-version@1.0.0 because it is found in the workspaces root node_modules before!

Follow the steps, having in mind that package-a is linked into project-a:

workspaces
  |-- node_modules // STEP 3
    |-- log-version@1.0.0 // STEP 4
  |-- packages
    |-- package-a (peerDependency: log-version ^1.0.0) // STEP 2
    |-- package-b (dependency: log-version@1.0.0)
    |-- package-c (dependency: log-version@1.0.0)

project-a
  |-- node_modules
    |-- log-version@1.1.0
    |-- package-a // STEP 1
  package.json
    * dependency:
      - log-version@1.1.0
      - package-a

In production

project-a has log-version@1.1.0 in dependency so uses version 1.1.0 when running
package-a has log-version ^1.0.0 in peerDependency so running in project-a, uses log-version@1.1.0

When not linked, we do have:

project-a
  |-- node_modules
    |-- log-version@1.1.0 // STEP 2
    |-- package-a // STEP 1
  package.json
    * dependency:
      - log-version@1.1.0
      - package-a

Steps to reproduce

clone the repository
at repository root, run yarn prepare to install all dependencies
at repository root, run yarn start to run project-a

Observe that despite being in peerDependency, log-version is used both @1.1.0 and @1.0.0

Solutions tried

no-hoist all workspaces

Solves the problem since there's no hoisting in the workspaces root node_modules, but for medium / large projects this is not an option because it doesn't scale (huge dependencies tree) and defeats the purposes of the workspaces in the first place.

Copy "package-a" in "project-a" using yalc

If we copy directly package-a in project-a:

project-a is responsible of package-a dependencies install

This ensures that there will be no differences between prod & dev results.

But copy is not free and costs more horse power, because in dev mode we want files to be copied on file change, which requires to have watchers on package-a that will trigger the copy operation. It doesn't scale if you want to chain package links, which can happen sometimes.

Colocate a devDep for each peerDep

We could make a trick in adding to package-a a devDependency for log-version and make this match the version provided by project-a.

Follow the steps, having in mind that package-a is linked into project-a:

workspaces
  |-- node_modules
    |-- log-version@1.0.0
  |-- packages
    |-- package-a
    |-- node_modules // STEP 2
      |-- log-version@1.1.0 // STEP 3
    package.json
      * peerDependency:
        - log-version ^1.0.0
      * devDependency:
        - log-version@1.1.0

project-a
  |-- node_modules
    |-- log-version@1.1.0
    |-- package-a // STEP 1
  package.json
    * dependency:
      - log-version@1.1.0
      - package-a

But it requires you to make sure the project and the devDependency are the same for each peerDependency for this to work, which is a pain for the teams.

Last but not least, using a peerDependency is usually involved because you want to use a single instance of a given dependency running in your application, so this "trick" is still not an option for some cases. It still is not the same as the unlink workflow.

Yarn PnP

Since plug'n play changes the way dependencies are resolved, it might entirely solve this problem.

In fact, the branch pnp of this repo proves that it indeed works!

But when we tried to move to PnP we encountered other issues (that we might decide to overcome anyway), so at the moment we would want things to work without PnP unless we are sure it's the only way to make things work.

mbeaudru / yarn-workspaces-peerdeps-resolution