npm install fails for a package added as dependency in another package

I have 2 services-serviceA and serviceB. serviceA is added as a dev-dependency in serviceB

package.json of serviceB has

“devDependencies”: { “serverless-bundle”: “^4.0.1”, “serviceA”: “^0.1.0” }

Expected Behavior

npm install should install serverless-bundle and ignore serviceA

Current Behavior

npm install fails with error

npm ERR! code E404
npm ERR! 404 Not Found - GET https://registry.npmjs.org/serviceA - Not found
npm ERR! 404
npm ERR! 404  'serviceA@^0.1.0' is not in the npm registry.
npm ERR! 404 You should bug the author to publish it (or use the name yourself!)
npm ERR! 404 It was specified as a dependency of 'serviceA'
npm ERR! 404
npm ERR! 404 Note that you can also install from a
npm ERR! 404 tarball, folder, http url, or git url.

</p></details>
{
  "packages": ["lib/*", "services/*"],
  "version": "0.0.0.0",
  "useWorkspaces": true,
  "npmClient": "npm"
}

<details><summary>lerna-debug.log</summary><p>
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```txt
<!-- If you have a `lerna-debug.log` available, please paste it here -->
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Context

Your Environment

Executable	Version
lerna --version	VERSION
npm --version	VERSION
yarn --version	VERSION
node --version	VERSION

OS	Version
NAME	VERSION

[jamiehaywood]

hi @s1mrankaur can you provide more details? It would be useful to see the package.json of serviceA.

[markdascher]

Not involved in this project at all, but as far as I can tell, this is by design. It’s more obvious once you know how lerna actually works, which is surprisingly hard information to find: https://github.com/lerna/lerna/issues/2447#issuecomment-608410145

lerna bootstrap is just calling npm install under the hood after removing local packages from the package.json.

In my case, I was trying to troubleshoot missing dependencies after an npx lerna bootstrap. Once I understood how lerna worked, I was able to mimic it by deleting the same local packages from package.json before running npm install.

There’s really no way npm install could possibly work without deleting the local packages from package.json first. npm would somehow have to know to skip the lerna-managed stuff. Maybe if lerna added something to package.json or package-lock.json, but I’m not sure what that would be.