How to debug npm modules?

Question

Normally you yarn/npm install react, then use it with import React from 'react'

Say you want to debug a React source and you clone a GitHub repo.

How do you use the source in your project instead of the lib version?

• edit

To further develop philipheinser's answer, here's what I encountered with doing npm link draft-js-mention-plugin

npm link seems to run npm run build which is the scripts command in the package.json that you want to link.

with draft-js-mention-plugin, npm run build runs ../node_modules/.bin/rimraf lib and I had to go up a directory and run npm install to install the rimraf

draft-js-mention-plugin has parent draft-js-plugins and it has its own package.json

Answer 1

You can use npm link your version of the code: https://docs.npmjs.com/cli/link.html

Answer 2

If you want to mimic a more production like situation you might use this workflow:

Create a package of your submodule locally:

cd /path/to/your/module
npm pack

This will create a .tgz file of your package in /path/to/your/module

Install the local package of the submodule in your application:

cd /path/to/your/application    
npm install /path/to/your/module/<YourModule>-<YourModulesVersion>.tgz

This will install the .tgz file in your application's node_modules directory

These steps should be repeated after adjustments to your module.