Support for Yarn portal dependencies

[rayshan]

Hi! I think the logic that detects whether next.js is installed should go through all the package.json's in a monorepo's packages.

For my project here, I'm using yarn v2 berry pnp to manage a monorepo. There are 2 packages:

• packages/common, containing shared components.
• packages/web, the app to build, depends on next.js and the above package via "@finance-apps/common": "portal:../common".

Here are my build settings:

This doesn't work because the root package.json doesn't depend on next.js. Changing the base directory in Netlify to packages/web doesn't work because we need yarn 1 to install yarn 2, and yarn 1 doesn't recognize portal dependencies.

[ehmicky]

Hi @rayshan,

Thanks for sharing this.

The core problem here is that we currently don't support Yarn-specific portal:... links in package.json.

A workaround in your case could be to yarn install next in packages/web/package.json. Since it's already one of your dependencies, this should not change anything except it would make Netlify's detection of Next.js work.
Would this workaround work for you?

[rayshan]

Thanks @ehmicky. next is already a dependency for the web package. It's not a dependency for the whole project though (i.e. not in the root package.json). Maybe that's what your build system or this plugin is looking for?

[ehmicky]

The plugin is using find-up from either the repository root directory or (if any) the base directory.
For monorepos, we recommend setting the base directory (link to documentation). This should solve your problem.

[rayshan]

I did:

Changing the base directory in Netlify to packages/web doesn't work because we need yarn 1 to install yarn 2, and yarn 1 doesn't recognize portal dependencies.

So you're right about the root cause being portal dependencies.

[ehmicky]

we need yarn 1 to install yarn 2

Looking at Yarn migration guide, it seems like this is the reason why you need this setup, correct?

Would adding next to the top-level package.json be an option?

[lukeocodes]

@rayshan did changing the base directory and having next installed as a regular dependency in the web/package.json resolve this for you?

[ericapisani]

Hi @rayshan ,

I created a test monorepo with the following structure to try and mirror what you mentioned above:

package2
|--> package.json
|--> add.js 

packageWithNextJS
|--> package.json  // References package2 as a portal dependency (i.e: "package2": "portal:../package2")
|--> pages
  |--> index.js  // Imports add.js from package2, invokes the function, and displays the result

package.json // contains no dependencies
yarn.lock

By setting the NETLIFY_USE_YARN environment variable to true within your sites' 'build & deploy' settings, you can get the Netlify builds to use yarn rather than npm, and not rely on Netlify's default behaviour of automatically using yarn when it detects a yarn.lock file in the base directory.

From the tests I was running, I suspect that because you had needed to specify that packages/web as your base directory as you mentioned above, the yarn.lock file may not have existed within that directory (in my test monorepo it existed on the root directory) and so Netlify attempts to use npm rather than yarn resulting in an error that looks something like:

Unsupported URL Type "portal:": portal:../package2

which is why setting the NETLIFY_USE_YARN appears to be needed.

If for some reason that still doesn't resolve your issue (perhaps because the yarn version installed tends to be v1 by default though my tests are showing that the portal dependency is correctly resolving with this environment variable alone), you can also set the yarn version explicitly by setting a YARN_VERSION environment variable to any released version above v2 (I used v3.2.0 to test).

I hope this helps!

[ericapisani]

Since it's been a couple of weeks since my previous message, I'm going to close this issue due to inactivity. If you continue to run into issues and my notes above didn't help resolve them, feel free to reopen this.