how to setup a project to develop on a npm package

Question

I have a git root project where I am using inside my root project a git subproject. So for example I have the project MyApp and a subproject UIComponents. Currently I have cloned the UIComponents repo into my project folder and added UIComponents to.gitignore of the root project. Now I want to build a npm package for UIComponents and I want to be able to switch between npm production build and development. The problem is in development the import is this:

import Button from './UIComponents'

and with the npm package the import is this:

import Button from '@my_name/UIComponents'

I dont want to adjust the imports everytime. The first thought that comes to mind is to develop the UIComponents inside node_modules folder but this seems not to be a nice solution.

Answer 1

For solving this, try to use npm link . So instead of cloning it in a subdirectory that need to be added to gitignore, just check out the repository outside of you project and then link it.

Example:

cd ~/projects/UIComponents
npm link  
cd ~/projects/MyApp
npm link @my_name/UIComponents 

In this way you can use the same import syntax but you can develop locally in both projects at the same time without the need of publishing every change.