Yarn isn't working [8pt]

Bug report

• I’ve updated both my project and my packages to the latest Frontity versions: https://docs.frontity.org/guides/keep-frontity-updated
• I’ve searched for existing issues.
• I’ve checked the documentation: https://docs.frontity.org
• I’ve checked the community forum: https://community.frontity.org

Expected behavior Users expect to be able to use yarn instead of npm.

Observed behavior yarn is not working because it doesn’t install local dependencies using symlinks. It copies the folder instead.

Possible solution We can use symlink-dir at frontity dev.

[luisherranz]

Impressive work @iamuchejude. Congratulations!! 😄

[luisherranz]

Oh, great discover @michalczaplinski.

The yarn team explicitly warns against using “aliases”

We are not using aliases.

They also support the link: and patch: protocols, which might or might not be what we are looking for.

No, but they also have portals and the is the exact same implementation than npm has for files! So it looks like that the yarn team decided to break compatibility with npm on purpose and what npm does with file: they do with portal:.

That’s really a shame because fixing this would be as simple as changing the package.json. But we can’t use both, and therefore we can’t support both.

Even though there are some options, like letting the user choose between npm or yarn on npx frontity create, they lead to problems in the future, when multiple people want to collaborate on the same project and they want to use different package managers.

We may use a preinstall script in the project and somehow check if the install command was called with yarn (I don’t know if that is possible) and if it was, change the package.json to portals and then on a postinstall script change it back to files, but that would complicate things for people wanting to use their own preinstall and postinstall scripts.

Well, it’s a shame that yarn has this functionality but with a different name. I don’t see a way right now to take advantage of it, so my opinion is to fix the links ourselves with the approach @iamuchejude is doing right now.