"lerna add" requires package to be present in remote registry (adding unpublished dependencies)

Hello!

Thank you for your hard work.

However, when using lerna add command like this: npx lerna add @acme/button --scope @acme/app it fails with an error: '@acme/button' is not in the npm registry.

I’m trying to add one local unpublished package to the other one.

In order to work around this I have to add the dependency manually to the package.json of the @acme/app package and then run: npm run bootstrap again, which takes some time to process the dependencies.

I think that lerna should be able to effectively add local unpublished dependencies to local packages, which is the point of using the monorepo in the first place.

Probably, the algorithm should be updated to first look for the specified dependency in the local monorepo’s tree, before trying the remote registry.

What do you think?

[madroneropaulo]

Still happens in 2020, any update?

[marcushultman]

We had a similar issue when adding local-package (a new, unpublished package) to some-other-package dependencies. When using npx lerna add local-package packages/some-other-package, local-package also ended up in the root package-lock.json (where some-other-package is declared a dependency using file:packages/some-other-package) causing the error message above.

Package	version
lerna	3.16.4
node	12.1.0
npm	6.9.0

To work around it it, first run without bootstrapping: npx lerna add --no-bootstrap local-package some-other-package. Then convert the dependency to a file:-dependency using npx lerna link convert. Now you should be able to run npx lerna bootstrap without it going to the registry for the unpublished dependency.

Adding by relative path (npx lerna add packages/local-package packages/some-other-package) seem to not work at all. By reading source it seems like the AddCommand expects a name from the spec, which is not returned by npm-package-arg for file system local packages.