[FIXED] How to prevent npm from resolving devDependencies on production install

Issue

I'm building a microservice app in a monorepo containing a bunch of microservices and a commons package. This commons package is never published to npm. (packages are managed with yarn workspaces)

Using parcel, the commons package is bundled into the production code, so I don't need to install it at run time.

Each microservice runs in its own docker container. So, when I build the docker container, Ideally, I'd want to ignore this "commons" dependency and install all the other ones. AFAIK, the only way to do this is to place the "commons" package in devDependencies.

However, it seems that even if I add it only to devDependencies and run npm i --only=production, npm still tries to resolve the package and still throws an ETARGET error.

Is there some way to completely ignore the devDependencies? My only other Idea is to write a script that removes the devDependencies field from the package.json before running npm install, but I wanted to ask here first to make sure I'm not missing anything.

Solution

There is a GitHub issue on the npm/cli repo tracking this issue here (#4967), where this behaviour is categorized as a bug.

So to answer your question, as far as the current status of the GitHub issue indicates, the intended behaviour is that devDependencies don't get attempted to be resolved in --production mode, and you shouldn't need to do anything extra to get this behaviour once the fix is made. I don't think you are missing anything.

The workaround you have thought of sounds reasonable to me.

On the GitHub issue, you can indicate "me too" with a thumbs up reaction (please don't spam the comments with "me too" comments).

Answered By - rainbow.gekota

Answer Checked By - Robin (PHPFixing Admin)