Symlink behaviour

[subhero24]

If I add a symlink in my src directory to another directory, and then include files from that path, create-react-app gives an error:

Module parse failed: Unexpected token
You may need an appropriate loader to handle this file type.

I assume create-react-app wants to have this import already built/transpiled. I would expect this to be the case for imports outside the src directory (node_modules for example). But since the symlink resides in the src directory, I would assume create-react-app would fetch these files as if they were truly in src directory.

Is this a bug, or expected behaviour? It makes it really hard to extract common components.

[Timer]

It sounds like a bug, but this should be working. Can you give more details to reproduce this easily & some test files? A repo with README would be fantastic.

[subhero24]

I created a repo here.

This was just initialisation with CRA under MacOS High Sierra and then symlinking in terminal with:

cd src && ln -s ../symlink

[Timer]

Thanks!

[nuthinking]

I actually have only problems with Symlinks when building for deployment: #3650

On dev it works well.

[bradfordlemley]

@BrunoVanDamme Can you elaborate on your use case? (Is it related to trying to share source between cra-apps and/or monorepo?)

[subhero24]

I am trying to share components between projects, so I would like to have these components in another directory and symlink to them from all the cra-apps where i would like to use them.

[bradfordlemley]

@BrunoVanDamme Have a look at #1333 which is for supporting source sharing via monorepo manager (lerna and/or yarn workspace).

I proposed a more generic source-sharing solution in #3436, but it has some downsides vs using a monorepo manager: (1) required some cra-configuration to specify allowable source paths, and (2) managing dependencies of those shared components is a job best left to some monorepo manager anyways...so, my favor has turned more toward using monorepo w/ managers for sharing source between apps. Curious if there's a reason for not using lerna and/or yarn workspace?

[subhero24]

As I understand yarn workspaces uses symlinks in the node_modules directory to other locations. My understanding is that CRA does not process files from node_modules, so I would have to do the transpiling on these external components myself. Is this correct? I would expect CRA to process the files symlinked from src as these files appear as if they where in the project itself.

[bradfordlemley]

Correct, currently CRA does not process those files, but #1333 tracks the feature request to make CRA process those files.

I think PR 3741 is pretty close to completing that feature, but there are some (minor?) open questions about how it should work. See questions in #1333 (comment) -- any feedback you could provide in that thread would be awesome and helpful in building consensus as to how it should work.