linking.md

Developing with linked packages

If you want to make changes to a package that Element Call depends on and see those changes applied in real time, you can create a link to a local copy of the package. Yarn has a command for this (yarn link), but it's not recommended to use it as it ends up modifying package.json with details specific to your development environment.

Instead, you can use our little 'linker' plugin. Create a file named .links.yaml in the Element Call project directory, listing the names and paths of any dependencies you want to link. For example:

matrix-js-sdk: ../path/to/matrix-js-sdk
"@vector-im/compound-web": /home/alice/path/to/compound-web

Then run yarn install.

Hooks

Changes in .links.yaml will also update yarn.lock when yarn is executed. The lockfile will then contain the local version of the package which would not work on others dev setups or the github CI. One always needs to run:

mv .links.yaml .links.disabled.yaml
yarn

before committing a change.

To make it more convenient to work with this linking system we added git hooks for your conviniece. A pre-commit hook will run mv .links.yaml .links.disabled.yaml, yarn and git add yarn.lock if it detects a .links.yaml file and abort the commit. You will than need to check if the resulting changes are appropriate and commit again.

A post-commit hook will setup the linking as it was before if a .links.disabled.yaml is present. It runs mv .links.disabled.yaml .links.yaml and yarn.

To activate the hooks automatically configure git with

git config --local core.hooksPath .githooks/