[Pro Tip] `npm link` explained 🎉

It's time for another Angular Knowledge Pill!
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Like taking your morning vitamins 😃

If you are working on a library that you want to import to your application you don't have to publish it to any npm repository! You can link it locally. Imagine you develop an Angular library or maybe you have your CSS theme in a separate npm package that you want to import to your application locally. You can use npm link command like below. 😎

npm link creates a symbolic link (symlink) from your <global node_modules> directory to the local library’s directory.

npm link <library-name> creates a symbolic link from project's local node modules directory ./node_modules/<library_name> to <global_node_modules>/<library_name>.

To locate your <global node_modules> directory, type npm root -g in the command line.

Now, you can import your library directly in your application like below. But, there is a catch! 😱

The catch is that you need one more change in your angular.json file! You need to add a property preserveSymlinks as presented below. And that's it! You can run your application with the local dependency! 🔥

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Comments

[Brian]

If you do this often it can become difficult to recall what packages you linked, or whether you've linked a particular library. You can find them all with

npm list -g --depth=0 --link=true

[Dario Piotrowicz]

This is great! Thanks a lot!

It worked perfectly for my project, I have tried this in the past but wasn't able to make it work, I suspect I wasn't aware of the preserveSymlinks option that needed to be set, but by following your blog it all went smoothly this time around :)

One thing to mention is that my application lags a bit behind and is using angular 5, in that I think that the option is not settable, so instead I simply need to use the --preserve-symlinks when serving it

[Bartosz Pietrucha]

Great! 💪💪💪

[Attilio Urbani]

Hello!

your hint fixed one of my issues.. I couldn't make the library working outside applications defined in the same workspace.

Thanks!

[Hexa]

So do you run the "npm link" in the root or the dist or ??

[Bartosz Pietrucha]

You are welcome!