Support for other package managers

[batzlerg]

Context

according to the docs, Hydrogen currently supports yarn 1.x and npm.

additionally, when deploying Hydrogen to Oxygen, the oxygen-deployment.yml file that is created uses yarn-specific commands like the caching example below:

- name: Get yarn cache directory
  id: yarn-cache-dir-path
  run: echo "::set-output name=dir::$(yarn cache dir)"

- uses: actions/cache@v2
  with:
    path: ${{ steps.yarn-cache-dir-path.outputs.dir }}
    key: ${{ runner.os }}-yarn-${{ hashFiles('**/yarn.lock') }}
    restore-keys: |
      ${{ runner.os }}-yarn-

---

Discussion

is support for other package managers (e.g. yarn 2.x, pnpm, lerna) planned in Hydrogen itself or the Oxygen deployment workflow?

if not, what are the significant blockers to adding that kind of support?

my team is responsible for contributing to and maintaining an ecosystem of applications, and an important developer experience criteria when evaluating Hydrogen is the ability to use a single consistent package manager across projects. supporting a variety of package managers would be a big win for Hydrogen in regarding ease of integration into existing systems.

[jplhomer]

Hi! I'm curious if you've tried other package managers like pnpm, and if you've run into any issues? The list in the docs is certainly not exhaustive. The only thing I can think might hinder other package managers would be filesystem logic used for React Server Components, which keys on filename suffix.

[blittle]

I'm pretty sure that yarn >1 will run into issues, because there is no node_modules directory.

[blittle]

What are the pros of supporting many different package managers? Is this an area where it would be okay for Hydrogen to be opinionated? Is there that much value for us to support every package manager in the ecosystem?

[tylerhellner]

If pnpm and yarn v2 were supported, Hydrogen would be compatible with the package managers supported by TurboRepo and Nx. At my job, we use Turborepo with pnpm and have found friction with getting the demo store up and running in this ecosystem.

With pnpm, running pnpm create @shopify/create-hydrogen fails with error code ERR_PNPM_PEER_DEP_ISSUES unmet peer dependencies. Adding auto-install-peers=true to an .npmrc file inside the destination folder of the app doesn't work either as pnpm create @shopify/create-hydrogen will fail with exit code 1 if the user elects to not delete the destination folder (and thus the .npmrc file with it).

To get around this, we overwrote our global npm config to allow auto-installing peer deps. After that bit, there were four peer deps that were not found causing the app to fail. pnpm i react-helmet-async react-error-boundary set-cookie-parser undici finally allowed us to boot the app. Surely there is a way to check pnpm installs its peer deps correctly or allow an .npmrc file to come along when creating a new app. Everything seems to work from this point onwards.

Let me know if I can help.