Upgrading from 1.6.0 Causes "Nothing to Install"

[rmorshea]

After upgrading from ^1.6.0 to ^2.10.2 Snowpack's scanner is no longer able to discover my imports. It simply claims there is:

Nothing to install.

I don't really understand why this is the case.

[drwpow]

Hey @rmorshea! Do you have a reproduction of the code you‘re working with? Do you have a snowpack.config.json file or something?

[drwpow]

Ah thanks for the code! Looking at your code, I see a ../web_modules/ import. In 2.x, that no longer has special significance, so when Snowpack encounters ../ it figures you’re handling relative imports yourself so it won’t try and install those.

You have a couple options for handling this in 2.x:

1. You could manually specify your dependencies with { install: ['fast-json-patch', 'htm', 'react', 'react-dom'] } in snowpack.config.json (docs). This would let Snowpack create that web_modules directory you’re referencing when you run snowpack install.
2. You could change '../web_modules/react.js' to 'react', but then you’d need Snowpack to transform your code for you to handle those imports. In that case, you’d run snowpack build instead.

Both are viable; just depends on whether or not you’d like Snowpack to automatically link your dependency paths for you or not.

[rmorshea]

Thanks! I saw that in the documentation but didn't realize it impacted import discovery.

[drwpow]

didn't realize it impacted import discovery.

I wouldn’t say it impacts import discovery; more like Snowpack is now only looking for “Node-style” imports (import React from 'react'), and doesn’t find any. Manually specifying install: [] forces it to install dependencies no matter what. This has actually always been an option for Snowpack, and was its original behavior way way back when it was @pika/web.

At any rate, it can be a good tool to force Snowpack to install certain dependencies without having to understand how the scanner does/doesn’t work (which when it works, it’s awesome, but I’ll admit when it doesn’t, it’s not clear what’s happening) 🙂

[rmorshea]

Does the scanner still work if you put a file extension in your import?

[drwpow]

Does the scanner still work if you put a file extension in your import?

Yup! It scans everything you import and import(). Again, I think the unexpected part in Snowpack 2.x is when it sees a local path it thinks “oh this must be local; I don’t need to install from npm / Skypack” and it’ll say “nothing to install.” But it still scans everything no matter what.