Tangible Bytes

The JavaScript ecosystem is a sea of choices and it seems to be all too easy to make an incompatible selection.

In my case I am using the Yarn package manager, the VSCode editor and TypeScript flavoured JS (I don’t think it really counts as a different language)

Every import statement was triggering an error in VScode

Cannot find module ’’ or its corresponding type declarations

There is a good page on stackoverflow

Yarn docs explain how to configure the edito

But neither of these worked for me and I’ve been down too many rabbit holes lately - I just want an easy solution.

The root of the issue is that Yarn 3 uses Plug’n’Play’ which doesn’t create the old node_modules folder but instead has a loader file with links to pakcges on disk (and somehow involving zip files)

Package management is hard - and it sounds like this solves some real problems but it was breaking my editor - the proposed solutions didn’t work - and I like having node_modules around to look through.

So I have downgraded yarn, reset my .vscode/settings.json file and everything seems to work OK

yarn set version classic

yarn install

now I have my node_modules back

Another option seems to be to configure yarn3 to use node_modules

But the version of yarn available by default in node docker images is yarn classic and all teh Dockerfiles I have seen just use this directly - I doin’t see it getting upgraded. So I’m sticking with yarn classic until I have a reason not to.