Please restore `--nofetch` flag to support Yarn

We’re using Yarn and without --nofetch our node_modules folder gets screwed by npm (invoked by cordova-fetch). We would really really like --nofetch back to be able to work.

[dpogue]

I would love to do that, but people need to be able to run commands like cordova platform add and cordova plugin add, and that needs to add the platform/plugin to package.json and install it into node_modules. We need to use npm to do that.

What we can do (and I’m working on this) is to not run any package management commands as part of cordova prepare. We should tell people to run npm/yarn/pnpm themselves and then look for what we need in node_modules, and warn if we can’t find it.

[leandro-manifesto]

Hello guys, here at my company we are using Cordova (and Ionic) to make some mobile apps.

We have a Jenkins agent doing Android builds with the following steps:

• npm install
• rm -rf platforms/ plugins/
• cordova prepare android
• cordova compile android --release

We have a mix of registry, git and local plugins and currently the prepare step takes a long time. From what I could understand cordova uses npm to install everything again, even though the install step already placed everything inside node_modules.

I tried using Yarn and pinning cordova-fetch to the patched version (apache/cordova-fetch@10870103c0d2a58ce0d8b91cf14053dd0c315b20) but npm is still being called for git and local dependencies.

I can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t be better if cordova ditched the dependency manager role and only used the node resolution algorithm to find the referenced plugins (and platforms), allowing the user to pick whatever package manager he prefers.