Issues, Workarounds and Tricks
A non-exhaustive list of things we had to do in order to make the monorepo work.
This is one of the most common issues we have when rebasing develop into our working branches.
To fix those, the best process is:
git checkout develop
git pull origin develop --rebase
git checkout my-current-branch
git checkout develop pnpm-lock.yaml
pnpm iWhat this does is get the latest code from the develop branch, switching back to our working branch, getting the pnpm-lock.yaml from develop and then reinstalling the package which will update the pnpm-lock.yaml accordingly.
Because we track certain version in this file, which when deleted and regenerated, might update without our consent some transitive dependencies, which can break our apps and libs.
Why: pnpm is stricter compared to yarn when handling transitive dependencies.
Solution: Add them as dependencies or devDependencies in the related package.json file.
Why: pnpm hoists dependencies in a workspace context and can duplicate them for instance if they have different peer dependencies versions.
Solution:
- LLM: force metro to resolve a dependency from the LLM node_modules by adding it to the
FORCED_DEPENDENCIESarray in themetro.config.jsfile. - LLD: force webpack to resolve a dependency from the LLD node_modules by adding a special alias in the webpack config file.
- Global: add the dependency inside the
readPackagefunction of the.pnpmfile.cjsfile to force-remove its peer dependencies.
'XXX' is not recognized as an internal or external command
Why: Running a binary by specifying its path in a script will not work on Windows. It is needed to prepend the command with a call to node.exe.
Solution: Use the x-ref homemade package to run binaries in a cross-platform compatible way.
Why: We use pnpm now and some tooling we use (namely turborepo) crawls all the folders and searches for yarn lockfiles to determine which package manager to use.
Solution: Delete each and every yarn lockfile.
Why: Because nodeify updates package.json files recursively by adding browser and react-native keys and this mutates packages stored inside the pnpm store and interferes with packages consumed by other modules in the monorepo (like LLD).
Solution: Use node-libs-react-native which means adding some requires in the metro.config.js file and an import in the entry file.
Why: See https://github.com/facebook/watchman/issues/105
Solution: @rnx-kit/metro-config provides a default config which watches every relevant workspace folders instead of just watching a single node_modules directory from LLM.
Why: See https://github.com/facebook/metro/issues/1
Solution: Use @rnx-kit/metro-resolver-symlinks as a main resolver in the metro.config.js file.
Why: The symlink resolver uses the node.js resolver under the hood and tries to resolve the location of the package.json file for each module. For packages that use subpath exports it will not work if they do not provide a path for the package.json file as subpath exports are exclusive. See https://nodejs.org/api/packages.html#subpath-exports
Solution: Add a fallback resolver in the metro.config.js file.
Why: Expo uses a custom algorithm to crawl dependencies and link them if they include compatible files. But it will fail for most deps because of the pnpm workspace node modules structure and symlinks.
Solution: Add custom NODE_PATH environment variables pointing to relevant directories. This is added in the Podfile for ios builds and in the Fastfile for android builds.
Why: we require ruby scripts from dependencies based on their node_modules location and with pnpm it could be tricky to hardcode it.
Solution: run a small node script to resolve the location from ruby.
Why: RNAnalytics redefined this header symbols for an unknown reason…
Update: likely related to this expo issue.
Solution: Patch on postinstall the RNAnalytics.h file to force importing the right header <React/RCTBridgeModule.h>.
Having issues on the match action (which gets our Apple's credentials):
This usually means the CGU have been updated on Apple Developer's account and need to be reviewed and accepted by the account holder.
Why: pnpm will not rebuild dependencies properly and there will be a mismatch between the local nodejs version and the electron one.
Why: Electron bundler crawls production dependencies and packs them inside an .asar file inside the binary. With the standard pnpm install with symbolic links and hoisting it will fail to copy the packages properly.
Solution: Use the --package-import-method=copy and --node-linker=hoisted flags when bundling the app.
In the build_app.yml github action workflow, using pnpm i --filter="live-desktop..." --no-frozen-lockfile --unsafe-perm to install only the smallest subset of depencencies results in an error while trying to build the app later on.
ERROR Cannot read property 'name' of undefined
Workaround: Use pnpm i while pnpm fixes this.