[NPM] Test npm packages locally in another project using npm link

Posted 2020-10-08 Answer1215

We will import our newly published package into a new project locally to make sure everything is working as expected. We can do this locally before publishing with npm link. This creates a symbolic link in our node_modules folder, so our unpublished local package is used like an installed published package. This is important because it lets us test making changes to our package and using them immediately without publishing and updating a package with each change we want to test. This is good practice to do before publishing a new version of a package.

 

Using npm link is easy:

1. Create you own project and cd to it.

2. Inside project run:

npm link <target_project_name>

<target_project_name> is from package.json name.

3. The important thing to remember that, inside target project, we have to mark that:

"main": "build/index.js",

It should point to the build folder or "dist" folder depends on your project.

4. Everytime you change code inside target project, you need to run trigger "build" runs again:

"dev": "watch ‘npm run build‘ src",