[Pro Tip] `npm link` explained 🎉

Bartosz Pietrucha - Sep 23 '19 - - Dev Community

It's time for another Angular Knowledge Pill!
It takes just a couple of seconds to learn something new 🔥
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. 😎

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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! 😱

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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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