Lerna does not support dependencies at the top level?

Question

I am in the process of switching my monorepo (back) from yarn (with workspaces) to lerna/npm, because yarn is too slow and unstable. However, I made an surprising discovery. With the following trivial package.json:

{
  "devDependencies": { "lerna": "^2.11.0" },
  "dependencies":    { "typescript": "^2.9.1" }
}

and an empty lerna.json (in other words, no packages at all), then when I run

$ lerna bootstrap

it does not install anything at all in any top-level node_modules directory. And if for some reason I have a node_modules directory with no .bin subdirectory, then lerna bootstrap fails to create or populate the .bin subdirectory.

Is lerna not designed to actually specify top-level packages which are to be installed (along with their binaries in .bin)? I do notice that if I try lerna add on a lerna monorepo with no packages, it complains that "lerna WARN No packages found in scope where tslint can be added."

I could not find anything related to this in the documentation. With yarn/workspaces, I was using the ability to install global (top-level) versions of things like TypeScript for use in my build scripts while maintaining control over the version installed.

I have exactly the same problem right now, any update on this? — Armin Šupuk

Unknown Unknown · Accepted Answer · 2018-06-06T04:12:56

From the Lerna docs:

You can add the root as a managed location (in the packages array of lerna.json) - if that's something you need. This would cause lerna to link root's dependencies to your packages' directories, run postinstall script along with the others, etc.

Lerna does not support dependencies at the top level?

1 Answers