noist (Short for No Hoist)

Repo for tricking NPM into not hoisting your package. No dependencies and a warning if imported.

Why?

As of npm@7 NPM supports NPM Workspaces which allows you to have multiple npm packages in a single folder structure.

NPM workspaces has a feature that deduplicates packages that are found multiple times in the folder structure.

For example, say there are two packages, package-a and package-b that both depend on jest@24

NPM 7+ will recognize this dependency is identical and "hoist" that package to the root of your mono repo, resulting in a tree like this:

node_modules/
  jest@24
packages/
  package-a
  package-b

The node resolution algorithm will search up the tree and find it successfully.

There are quite a few pitfalls related to hoisting, notably if the package has peerDependencies or requires a single-copy in the tree this can cause issues where sibling dependencies end up importing the wrong package.

Thankfully, until this is fixed in npm itself @ruyadorno from the npm team proposed a workaround prisma/prisma#9649

This package is created to facilitate that workaround with the following requirements:

• There are NO dependencies of this node package
• The package instantly throws an error warning you and linking to this document if you accidentally import it

How?

If you want to use this, first of all, try not to have to by syncing up your dependency tree and aligning to similar versions.

If you do need to use this you can install it at the root of your NPM workspaces repo with:

npm i package-to-not-hoist@npm:noist@1

Confirm you have it downloaded by:

cat node_modules/package-to-not-hoist/package.json

Make sure you replace package-to-not-hoist with the actual npm package you want to replace.

Security

The reason I made this package with 0 dependencies is to protect from having erroneous packages with random dependencies being injected into the tree (especially when they won't end up matching the names).

One thing to consider if you are looking to use this package however is to not use it straight away, after all that would be trusting me entirely to not do the same thing I was not willing to trust above, but to fork this repo and publish your own version of this package for your and your companies use.

I don't anticipate publishing any new version of this package ever, but it is always best to be cautious with any dependency you install.

Contributing

If you want to contribute docs or examples to this repo feel free, my hope is that this is a stop gap measure and won't be needed once npm supports a nohoist flag or some feature that is similar.

Subscribe to this RFC on npm to be notified if and when this feature is built-into npm workspaces.