Finishing Up

I recently wrote a post explaining how to get started using the pnpm package manager with telescope. Today I want to talk about the process of getting to the "Merged PR" finish line.

Navigating through problems

Getting pnpm to work on telescope was far from smooth. It all started with silly bugs. For example I removed a dependency (npm-run-all) that I thought was not needed just to realize that the front-end would break in all sorts of ways.

GitHub Actions

Once I fixed all the small errors and was satisfied with the local implementation, I started to work on changing the GitHub Actions CI to also use pnpm. After many unsuccessful attempts, I was relieved to see that all the GitHub Actions jobs passed. My pnpm implementation worked!

But things were not over... After making a small change in the docs, I pushed a new commit and then saw this:

ERR_PNPM_OUTDATED_LOCKFILE  Cannot install with "frozen-lockfile" because pnpm-lock.yaml is not up-to-date with package.json

How was this possible? I did not make any new changes to any of the package.json or pnpm-lock.yaml files and now CI stopped working.

After speaking with David, he suggested to tackle a problem that could have been the cause of this error: Standardize package versions across package.json files (Spoiler, this wasn't the problem).

Standardize package versions

While working on this secondary issue, I changed all the dependencies to use the caret (^) version and the only one that gave me some trouble was Prettier. It turns out that a minor update from Prettier could create new formatting changes to the files and since we were using npm without a lock file, our CI was failing (Thanks Duke for finding this out!).
It took a few more failed CI attempts (mainly due to connection issues) for this PR to be ready.

Back to pnpm

Before including the changes made in my secondary PR, I decided to try one more time to wipe all npm_modules, reinstall pnpm, rebase my branch, run pnpm install and finally push the newly created pnpm-lock.yaml file.

Just like magic, all the GitHub Actions jobs passed!

The simple explanation is that the pnpm-lock.yaml file had problems and despite my many attempts to generate a working copy, it took this one extra try to fix it. I suspect it was due to having originally installed pnpm from a script and then not having it properly removed from my system before reinstalling it with npm install -g pnpm.

Sticking with it

I had a few days where I felt like all the work was for nothing because there were numerous problems that I could not figure out.

In a way I am glad that I encountered so many obstacles because it allowed me to dive deeper in my understanding of package managers and Continuous Integration with GitHub Actions.

I want to end this post by saying that I am very pleased with the feedback I received from everyone in the telescope community after they started using pnpm. Seeing all the positive comments made everything I worked on in the last few week even more worth it!