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Importing local directory as a package in NPM🐁

Sometimes, we need to modify third-party libraries for our projects, but we don’t want to publish the changes as public packages. Both NPM and Yarn offer a simple solution to import a local directory as a package, allowing us to make modifications without the hassle of publishing.

linked in comment about patch-package Update: if your use case allows storing “diff files” you can use https://www.npmjs.com/package/patch-package, otherwise continue reading.

Let’s say we have package called foo-pack Using NPM:

  • pull the package to project root directory
  • navigate to the directory cd foo-pack
  • install all dependencies npm install or yarn
  • remove package.lock rm package.lock or rm yarn.lock
  • modify package.json so it doesn’t contain link to the package
{
    "name": "foo-pack",
    "version": "3.76.0",
    "description": "foo description",
    "author": "foo",
    // remove this part below from json 👇️
    "repository": {
        "type": "git",
        "url": "https://github.com/foo-pack/foo-pack"
    },
    // remove this part above from json ☝️
    "license": "Apache-2.0",
    ...
}
  • run install again in order to generate correct lock files
    • npm install or yarn
  • go to your project directory
    • cd ..
  • add foo-pack to your package
    • npm install --save ./foo-pack or yarn add file:./foo-pack
  • now if we go to our package json we can easily find
    ...
    "dependencies": {
        ...
        "foo-pack": "file:./foo-pack",
        ...
    },
    ...

🎊 TADA 🎉

Benefits:

  1. Flexibility: Customize libraries for your project without restrictions.
  2. Real-time Updates: Changes are immediately reflected in your project.
  3. Isolation: Keep changes local, avoiding unintended bugs in other projects.
  4. Version Management: Easily switch back to the original version if needed.

Remember to document all the changes and/or use the mighty git. 🌳

Please give me feedback, comment on whatever you think about my blog post, and help me improve. ❤️

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