If you work on a Javascript environment, you might have ran into the issue where you do open a PR on a package, but want to use your fork while the PR is being merged.

with npm or yarn, you can add a "github" version doing that:

yarn add lodash@github:lodash/lodash

See yarn documentation of yarn add

But if you do that, you will likely have this in your node_modules folder:

node_modules/
  some-package/
    package.json
    README.md

You can see that there is no JS files here !

Why ? Because a lot of javascript package rely on a "build" step before publishing to npmjs.org.

I though that the only way to solve this would be to "namespace" the package under "@jdeniau/some-package" by modifying the package.json name key, but I found this stackoverflow answer explaining how "npm prepare" works and that's exacly what I want to do in that case.

I just have to add a prepare script in the package.json file, and it will work perfecly fine:

    "scripts": {
+     "prepare": "npm run build"
    }

If you read the npm script documentation:

prepare (since npm@4.0.0)

• Runs BEFORE the package is packed
• Runs BEFORE the package is published
• Runs on local npm install without any arguments
• Run AFTER prepublish, but BEFORE prepublishOnly
• NOTE: If a package being installed through git contains a prepare script, its dependencies and devDependencies will be installed, and the prepare script will be run, before the package is packaged and installed.

This way I can add the package doing yarn add some-package@jdeniau/some-package and the dist folder will be included in the node_modules.

⚠️ Be careful not including that in your PR though, as it should be only a temporary solution until the PR is merged. If it is not, due to inactivity, you might want to use the namespace alternative.