Adding a --no-bin-links option

[sofianegargouri]

Hi !

Is there a way to add a NPM-like --no-bin-links option.
It is used by VM users who share folders between a host and a VM.

Example:
Vagrant

[Reanmachine]

@sofianegargouri

As a side note, you're going to have a hellish time running Jest in your setup. The project analysis in jest last time i used it was stat() heavy. One of the areas the shared folder situation fails miserably in solutions like Vagrant (On Virtualbox at least) is IOPS.

It may have changed since my last time using jest but I know it was this slow IOPS problem that drove me to use a native linux machine for development instead of a VM from windows.

[gaearon]

I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. Can you provide a more detailed feature request? What would this flag do, compared to how we're doing things now?

[sofianegargouri]

I guess that actually you are creating some links while running the commands, but it can break when there are shared folders between 2 different systems (as for Vagrant users). To prevent that, NPM added an option to prevent those Symlinks.

As written in their documentation:

The --no-bin-links argument will prevent npm from creating symlinks for any binaries the package might contain.

I don't know if it is understandable, but when I tried to create a project, I had many conflicts with symlinks that prevented me from using your amazing tool.

[gaearon]

Oh, I see. So you'd like create-react-app myapp --no-bin-links to pass that option down to npm install call, is that correct?

[gaearon]

This should be an easy first PR.

[sofianegargouri]

I don't know if it's only needed in npm install as I wasn't able to go further

[gaearon]

If Yarn supports it then in both. Check if Yarn supports it by inspecting its source 😉

[jkomyno]

I actually tried to add "--no-bin-links" to this line, however I ended up with this:

Installing react-scripts...
npm ERR! Linux 3.2.0-23-generic
npm ERR! argv "/usr/bin/nodejs" "/usr/bin/npm" "install" "--save-dev" "--save-exact" "--no-bin-links" "react-scripts"
npm ERR! node v6.9.5
npm ERR! npm v3.10.10

npm ERR! Maximum call stack size exceeded

[gaearon]

File a bug with npm?

[Reanmachine]

@gaearon This is a common bug with npm with --no-bin-links, it typically involves dependency cycles see npm#9224.

When you have dependencies that have cycles in the graph the symlinks tend to solve the problem but when you tell npm it can't symlink it blows up recursing forever until the npm call stack is exhausted.

The desire for the --no-bin-links option typically comes with working on windows (where symlinking doesn't exist or requires elevation), or with vagrants vms (shared folders between a linux vm and a windows host) has issues with creating/maintaining symlinks.

My first guess would be that there's a dependency cycle happening somewhere in one of the many dependencies of react-scripts but realistically that could be upstream in anything or local to CRA.

[gaearon]

Thanks for explaining.