Cover photo credit: JJ Ying

While writing a fair amount of API calls in javascript, I was getting frustrated with the process of validating the payload of each call. Working with my team we came up with a simple little method that would allow us to write a class for each API response and then coerce the response into that class.

This code has a lot of universality and having copied it to a few projects we knew it was time for an npm package.

All of these uses were being shipped to production so we needed a safe way to extract this small function into a package, and validate it was working properly before shipping to production again.

npm-link to the rescue

npm link provides the tooling needed to both develop and consume an npm package locally.

We started by creating a new npm module called @meltwater/coerce. This module contained the simple 10 line method we were using for class based type coercion.

Local npm package

We need to make the module available for install locally.

cd local/git/folder/coerce
npm link

The output of this helps us understand what’s actually happening here.

/path/to/global/node/modules/node_modules/@meltwater/coerce -> /local/git/folder/coerce

A symlink was created in our global node_modules folder that points to our local version of coerce. Notice that the package name is used in the node_modules folder. This will correspond to the name field in your package.json.

Consuming a local npm package

Now we need to reference the newly created reference from the project we are removing this code from.

cd local/git/folder/main-project
npm link @meltwater/coerce

Notice that we are referencing the package name, and not the folder name! Checking the output again we’ll see a symlink chain occurring:

/local/git/folder/main-project/node_modules/@meltwater/coerce -> /path/to/global/node/modules/node_modules/@meltwater/coerce -> /local/git/folder/coerce

Now that we’ve created a reference in the main project, testing it locally is as simple as replacing the references in our files from:

import coerce from '../coerce';

To

import coerce from '@meltwater/coerce';

Now all of our tests should be passing, and we can have the confidence that our code extraction was successful.

Cleaning up when we’re done

Now that we’ve tested and everything is looking good, we should cleanup our local environment. Similar to npm link there is an npm unlink command, and it works exactly as you would expect.

cd local/git/folder/coerce
npm unlink

In the main project we need to unlink, but we also need to reference the newly published package:

cd local/git/folder/main-project
npm un`link @meltwater/coerce
npm i @meltwater/coerce

Quick summary

npm link gives us the tooling we need to both write and validate npm packages locally. It’s a very simple tool that gives us a great way to validate any new or updated package before publishing.