Doesn't work with yarn workspaces by default

I have a monorepo which is essentially a repository with many npm packages in it and I just started using yarn workspaces which hoists all dependencies to the root of the repository. I realized that all my node_modules were getting included because they were now located in a node_modules folder two parents up. So I had to switch to externals: /node_modules/

[chadly]

@barraq you can accomplish the same thing without any code changes to this package by just including multiple instances:

externals: [
  nodeExternals(),
  nodeExternals({
    modulesDir: path.resolve(__dirname, '../../node_modules')
})],

[atdixon]

+1

Ideally the default modulesDir behavior would be to walk the workspace to its root (consulting all node_modules directories from package to root); thus, webpack-node-externals would work out of the box for monorepos.

There are a few issues with the current solutio of hard-coding module dirs:

• It is brittle (ie, breaks if a package is moved/copied etc within the monorepo).
• Options (eg whitelist) have to be repeated for each declaration.
• Etc.

Also, node itself seems to resolve from node_modules up the directory tree. (I see it do so when I run node scripts that require hoisted libs.) Webpack and other libraries, similarly. So this would be idiomatic, no? If so, perhaps there’s a direct/normalized library/facility for doing this walk that could be leveraged.