[BUG] npm v7 does not preserve indentation style

[valtlai]

Current Behavior:

The indentation style in package.json and package-lock.json is not preserved.

Expected Behavior:

For example, if package.json is indented using tabs, the tabs should be preserved and package-lock.json should use tabs too. Similarly, the number of the spaces used for indentation should be preserved.

This is the behavior in npm v6.

Steps To Reproduce:

1. Create a package.json with tab indentation:

{
	"private": true
}

2. Install a package:

npm install globals

3. See how the tabs have gone:

{
  "private": true,
  "dependencies": {
    "globals": "^13.2.0"
  }
}

Environment:

• OS: macOS 10.15.6
• Node: 14.7.0
• NPM: 7.0.0-beta.4

[ljharb]

oof, this is a critical showstopper regression :-/

[MylesBorins]

I've seen this reproduce locally

[isaacs]

Yep, that's a bug.

[valtlai]

The indentation style of the existing files is now preserved, but a newly created package-lock.json does not use the indentation style of package.json.

[ruyadorno]

hi @valtlai thanks for reporting these issues 😄 the package-lock.json auto-format using same indentation style from package.json have now landed in the latest beta release v7.0.0-beta.13 - as usual you can try it out with:

npm i -g npm@next-7

Let us know if you find more issues 😊 Thanks again!

[9oelM]

I am using npm@7.18.1 and able to reproduce this issue. For example: 9oelM/youtube-lite@7104320. This is actually a commit made by Renovate bot, and it uses npm 7. You can see that package-lock.json has the same number of lines added and deleted.. which just means that it does not preserve indentation.

If you are in doubt of the version Renovate uses, there are also other commits that I made; for example: 9oelM/youtube-lite@f3d1460
This commit was made by myself and it still does not respect existing indent.

[gjoseph]

@ruyadorno This issue seems to have popped back up (I'm using 7.24.2)

[gjoseph]

... and reverting to 7.24.1 fixes that problem

[gjoseph]

(I've also tried 8.1.1 without success)

[isaacs]

@gjoseph In npm v8, it will format package-lock.json to match package.json.

I'm not saying that's the right thing to do, and I somewhat agree that, in lieu of an explicit format option, is should preserve whatever is there. But that's what's happening now. If you want your package-lock.json to be indented a particular way, then you have to have your package.json indented in the same fashion, and it will keep them in sync.

If you'd like it to do a different thing, please open a new issue. The OP here is fixed, and what you're proposing (while imo reasonable) is a new change from that design.

[gjoseph]

Thanks for the response @isaacs - the odd thing is, both my package-lock.json and package.json are formatted by the same prettier rules, as far as I know (I have a prettier-check in CI, which is how I noticed this change)

I did open #3948 btw 😬

[gjoseph]

Well, I don't know what I was doing differently the other day, because I'm not able to reproduce now -- this may have been related to Lerna, which I had (probably wrongly) assumed was only causing different lock issues in the sub-packages lock files (i.e after reverting to 7.24.1, only the issues in sub-packages remained, so I assumed npm itself was causing the issues I saw in the root look file)

I've now gotten rid of Lerna altogether and don't see this issue again.

[ephemer]

I am experiencing this bug with 8.1.0.

Normally our package-lock.json is indented with 2 spaces (no idea why) and package.json is indented with 4 spaces. If I add a package npm i some-package then npm will rewrite package-lock.json with 4 spaces (presumably to match package.json) but if I run npm install by itself then it will re-format to the 2 spaces version. I don't really mind which it stays with, but it's quite annoying to have to catch this in every PR before merge.

@isaacs FYI