The inferred type of "X" cannot be named without a reference to "Y". This is likely not portable. A type annotation is necessary.

Bug Report

🔎 Search Terms

inferred type cannot be named, symlink node_modules

🕗 Version & Regression Information

I’m verifying the problem on the typescript@4.1.3. I’ve not tried older versions but at least is also reproducible on the @next version as of today.

It is probably a regression or a corner case related with other issues opened and already closed like:

• https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/30858
• https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/28689
• https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/2338
• https://github.com/microsoft/TypeScript/issues/29221

⏯ Playground Link

Link for a repo where the problem is being reproduced

NOTE: Just clone the repo and run yarn tsc

💻 Code

All the relevant code can be found at https://github.com/mistic/reproduce-typescript-problem-when-symlinking-node_modules

It is just reproducing a similar setup that I had on other project that was generating the problem:

• node_modules are a symlink to another location that is not a direct parent of the symlinked node_modules
• we are using types in the compilation from a library where those types are just exported from other one, like for example withRouter within react-router-dom that is just a plain export from the same type on react-router.

🙁 Actual behavior

I got the following error:

error TS2742: The inferred type of 'Nav' cannot be named without a reference to '../../deps/node_modules/@types/react-router'. This is likely not portable. A type annotation is necessary.

8 export const Nav = withRouter(({ history }: NavProps) => {
               ~~~


Found 1 error.

🙂 Expected behavior

I was expecting no error at all and that the typescript compiler was just able to find all the respective modules. I’ve tried everything that I thought was related like enabled the preserveSymlinks. The only thing that stops the error is importing the withRouter type directly from react-router and not from react-router-dom but that doesn’t make very sense because I actually want to use the react-router-dom on a couple of places.

\cc @weswigham @sheetalkamat @andrewbranch because I saw you previously worked to try to solve similar issues.

[paynecodes]

I get this issue throughout many scenarios when using a Rush monorepo. Rush, by default, uses pnpm (pnpm workspaces is recommended). I haven’t been able to track down the root cause, but I have scoured this issue tracker and subscribed to many topics hoping someone squashes this.

[imcuttle]

In my case, add preserveSymlinks for resolve it

{
  "compilerOptions": {
    "preserveSymlinks": true
  }
}