When developing and authoring multiple packages (private or public), you often find yourself in need of using the latest/WIP versions in other projects that you are working on in your local environment without publishing those packages to the remote registry.

NPM and Yarn address this issue with a similar approach of symlinked packages (npm/yarn link). Though this may work in many cases, it often brings nasty constraints and problems with dependency resolution, symlink interoperability between file systems, etc.

Quick start

Note: my-proj is the local dependent package and my-lib is the local dependency package.

1. Install yalc globally

$ npm i -g yalc

2. Publish your dependency to the yalc store

[my-lib] $ yalc publish

3. Add the yalc-stored dependency to your dependent project

[my-proj] $ yalc add package-b

3a. Install the dependencies of the dependency if they aren’t already installed

[my-proj] $ npm i

4. After making changes to your dependency, update the package in the store and push the changes to the dependent project

[my-lib] $ yalc push

5. Remove the dependency from the dependent project

[my-proj] $ yalc remove my-lib

How it works:

• yalc acts as very simple local repository for your locally developed packages that you want to share across your local environment.
• When you run yalc publish in the package directory, it grabs only files that should be published to NPM and puts them in a special global store (located, for example, in ~/.yalc).
• When you run yalc add my-package in your project it pulls package content into .yalc in the current folder and injects a file:/link: dependency into package.json. Alternatively, you may use yalc link my-package which will create a symlink to the package content in node_modules and will not touch package.json (like npm/yarn link does), or you even may use it with Pnmp/Yarn/Npm workspaces.
• yalc creates a special yalc.lock file in your project (similar to yarn.lock and package-lock.json) that is used to ensure consistency while performing yalc‘s routines.
• yalc can be used with projects where yarn or npm package managers are used for managing package.json dependencies.