The need for something like painless-link has arisen while trying to split a large project into many small submodules (for various reasons). In order to do so and to be able to continue using HMR, we linked the various submodules to our package via npm link. However we found out, that we had to manually execute npm link <SUBMODULE> every time we did an npm install in our root project.

With a rising number of submodules, the number of symlinks also increased - meaning, that we had to type npm link <SUBMODULE> dozens of times after every npm install. Therefore, we decided to create ‘painless-link’ - a configurable and fully automatic symlink solution utilizing npm link. 🤩

Global

npm install -g painless-link

...or as a package dependency

npm install --save-dev painless-link

1. Add every dependency which should be resolved as following to your package.json:

{
  "linkedDepedancies": {
    "dependencyA": "../modules/dependencyA"
  }
}

2. Add painless-link to your scripts

{
  "scripts": {
    "postinstall": "painless-link link"
  }
}

Any contribution is highly appreciated - just open a PR containing your changes and we will have a look at it ASAP!

Want to contribute, but don't know what to do? Don't worry, we got you! Have a look at the roadmap to find out what's missing. Thanks in advance! 🤩

Every project can be improved - this also applies to this package 🤓 here is what we have in mind regarding the future of this package:

• make it easier 😋
• better error handling
• own symlink system to avoid collisions with any external usage of nmp link (and to avoid permission problems caused by npm link due to it linking everything into a global/systemwide folder)
• configuration file
• add tests
• build an advanced CLI for more options e.g. a verbose mode
• environment specific linking like only linking in NODE_ENV=development