pnpm is not being detected by chromatic-cli

Bug report

Our team has started using pnpm as our go-to package manager (npm compatibility with existing tooling + performance of yarn2 = win). We’re hitting a snag when using --patch-build. From what I can gather, that flag causes a call to installDependencies() which in turn is using yarn-or-npm to spawn the installation process.

Interestingly, the default seems to be yarn in our repo even though the README states that npm is the fallback.

It seems that our pipelines are able to publish to chromatic.com without issue, but I don’t know if the pnpm support that currently exists with chromatic-cli is intentional or incidental - filing as a bug made sense, but I could also see who this might be a feature request.

[tmeasday]

@wollardj the only reason chromatic needs a patch build is when there is no chromatic build for the merge base of the PR: https://www.chromatic.com/docs/branching-and-baselines#patch-builds

So a more manual solution looks something like:

1. Run Chromatic for the last commit of the base branch (or push a new commit and do that)
2. Merge the base branch into the head branch (or rebase)
3. Run chromatic for the new head commit (merge or rebased).

The patch build feature is really just something to help folks get started with UI review before they have an existing set of builds on their repo.

[wollardj]

I’m reluctant to say it’s blocking us. Our primary blocker is time right now; time to look into work arounds. We are able to upload assets to Chromatic, but we’re not able to generate the original patch that Chromatic needs to expose change sets. We can certainly switch to npm or yarn, but then we’re back to our lack of time 😄