Is it necessary to copy all modules from node_modules directory, including devDependencies?

I have this package.json

{
    "nativescript": {
        "id": "org.nativescript.test1",
        "tns-android": {
            "version": "1.4.0"
        }
    },
    "dependencies": {
        "tns-core-modules": "1.4.0"
    },
  "devDependencies": {
    "babel": "^5.8.29",
    "gulp-debug": "^2.1.2"
  }
}

I have some devDependencies modules, and of course, after install, they are placed to node_modules. After build, all of them are copied to platforms\android\src\main\assets\app\tns_modules\. (app-debug.apk contains it too) I’m using devDependencies modules for building and testing only.

Is it really necessary to copy them all?

[rosen-vladimirov]

Hi @unlight ,

Thanks for sharing the steps to reproduce. In fact there are two different “issues” here. The first one is related to npm3 as you have noticed. It really flattens the dependencies and when we process them, we do not know if they are from dependencies or devDependencies section of any module. The issue occurs whenever you install npm package with npm i (when you are using npm 3). The workaround is to remove node_modules directory and execute your tns command, for example tns build android. One of the first steps that we execute during preparing the project is to ensure all dependencies are installed. In case you do not have node_modules directory, we’ll install the dependencies with the npm version that we have in our nativescript-cli (2.14.12 - https://github.com/NativeScript/nativescript-cli/blob/master/package.json#L57). This way all packages will be installed correctly (as we are using npm 2) and we’ll prepare them correctly in the native project. The other issue is one implementation detail in our logic - when we process node_modules we get all directories (and subdirectories and subsubdirectories, etc.) and we filter only the ones that are devDependency of any package. When a package in node_modules is not defined anywhere in any package.json, we do not filter it as it is not defined as devDependency.

Hope this makes sense for you 😃

[irwansyahwii]

I think this issue must be open again since I found out if we install npm module as a dev dependency then it won’t get copied to the tns_modules folder hence it will run error at run time. So the fix is to remove the platform and re-add it again and install the module as a runtime dependency.