[rush] bin field is ignored for linked packages

[lhorie]

If a rush workspace contains two projects, one of which has a bin script and the other depends on the first, the second project will not get a node_modules/.bin symlink to the script of the first.

See this repo for repro steps: https://github.com/lhorie/rush-bin-bug

PS: I'm willing to submit a PR to fix this if someone can guide me to the appropriate whereabouts

[octogonz]

Your repro is using the style where NPM itself generates the binary script during installation. Since Rush links (rather than installs) the local projects, rush would need to reproduce that binary-generating heuristic, which is nontrivial and a little different for yarn/pnpm/npm.

For our projects, we instead explicitly define the binary script, like this:

https://github.com/Microsoft/web-build-tools/blob/master/apps/api-extractor/bin/api-extractor

The api-documenter project depends on api-extractor. If you run rush install in the web-build-tools repo, you will see that a binary gets written here:

./apps/api-documenter/node_modules/.bin/api-extractor

Would that solve your problem?

[lhorie]

Sorry, I'm not sure I'm following. What's different between the repro repo and the way api-extractor gets written into the node_modules/.bin of api-documenter in the web-build-tools repo?

[Toxaris]

We are having the same issue. Based on the discussion in #915 and #1024, we are guessing that node_modules/.bin symlinks to projects in the same repository only work for using rush with pnpm but not for using rush with yarn.

[octogonz]

@lhorie sorry I overlooked your reply back in Feb.

The difference is that with api-extractor's, the symlink target exists at the time when rush install is running, because the target is a source file tracked by Git. Whereas with the other approach, rush install would need to create a symlink to a potentially nonexistent target (i.e. that won't exist until after rush build completes). This can be problematic, e.g. if I remember right, we create hardlinks on Windows, which require the target to exist.

Does that make sense?

[octogonz]

@Toxaris I agree that perhaps all these issues could be solved by updating Yarn/NPM to use the more sophisticated pnpmLinkBins() function mentioned in #915 (comment) . Even though it's part of the PNPM package manager library, if I understand right this function should work fine for Yarn and NPM.

This should be an easy fix. Maybe someone could create a PR?

[chrisdothtml]

Bit late to the party, but after testing with @lhorie 's repro repo, @octogonz 's recommended solution isn't actually why it's working for api-extractor. It still doesn't work after converting the my-cli to an explicit binary. The only reason api-extractor is working is because it's using pnpm instead of yarn.

Looks like the same issue exists with npm, so I think the only solution is something like pnpmLinkBins for npm and yarn

[chrisdothtml]

PR made for this: #1256

[bweggersen]

We just hit this issue when trying to add Rush to our repo using yarn as the package manager. Specifically, we can't see any bin scripts added to node_modules/.bin from any of the internal dependencies. Here's a repro repo: https://github.com/bweggersen/rush-bin-bug-yarn

[yeegor]

Still experiencing issues with this. Please fix! 😁

[mshimokura]

We are also still experiencing this issue. A workaround is to rush install --only <package with bin> and rush build --only <package with bin> the binary first, then it will be linked into <package requires bin>/node_modules/.bin when you run rush install / rush build later on.