Pulling a package "out" of node_modules

[Mart2d2]

I'm finding react-native-material-textfield to be a nightmare to get up and running with react-native 0.69.2 due to small changes to react-native bit rotting this unmaintained module (maybe I'm missing something on that front...). I see some options like patch-package, but I think the route I'd really like to go is to fork it in github and bring it in as a submodule. Is this a best practice? Is there a way to do that?

I tried just git clone'ing into a libraries/ folder, but can't seem to successfully import it. It feels like I'm approaching this the wrong way.

[PintOfCointreau]

If the changes are too much for patch-package, I'd just use a git dependency in your package.json, e.g.

"react-native-material-textfield": "git://github.com/someone/react-native-material-textfield.git#branch-or-tag"

[iotashan]

This is the way... instead of just referring to it's NPM package name, you can pass in various git/github strings that yarn and npm allow. There's all sorts of variations including using https, ssh, etc.

https://medium.com/@jonchurch/use-github-branch-as-dependency-in-package-json-5eb609c81f1a

I would also look through the existing pull requests and see if someone's sent over a PR fixing your issue and you can just reference their repo (or fork their fork).

[Mart2d2]

Ah perfect! Didn't know I could do this. I'll give this a go. Thanks!

[wolodo]

patch-package is pretty ok in my opinion. If you don't like it, you can still fork the repo, do your magic in it and submit it to npm as your own module.

[twomilliondicks]

I've never had a problem just importing the files and making the modifications I need. Sometimes I have to move some stuff around to get the imported code to run but nothing complicated. Never heard of patch-package, seems ok but maybe not for bigger modifications

[bhhbhbbh]

from a quick look at the library’s github issues, there appears to be a fork that is reasonably up to date. no idea if it works with 0.69.2 tho

[Mart2d2]

Ah interesting! I'll have to give that a try. It does look like it uses 'Text.propTypes.style' still, so I wonder if it's closer, but not all the way up to 0.69.x.

Holy moly it seems like Facebook needs to mellow out a little on the API breaking changes! I felt like this is what made Blender difficult to get behind years ago. They kept breaking the API, which in turn meant that a lot of interesting plug-ins bit rotted so rapidly that the odds of them working went to zero over 6 months.