Support resolving architect builders relative to project

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#20,453 2 comments 0 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
35/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
angular, typescript
Domain
build-system, cli

Research direction

Start by tracing how architect builders referenced in angular.json are resolved, comparing that behavior with the described project-relative schematic resolution. Review the root package.json and the test application's package.json, then verify that build, serve, test, e2e, lint, extract-i18n, and run can use the project's builder dependencies without requiring them at the repository root.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area: @angular/cli feature feature: insufficient votes

🚀 Feature request

Command (mark with an x)
  • new
  • build
  • serve
  • test
  • e2e
  • generate
  • add
  • update
  • lint
  • extract-i18n
  • run
  • config
  • help
  • version
  • doc
Description

Schematics are loaded relative to the project first, and if the collection isn't found in the project then it's resolved in the folder the angular.json is in. This is great because it allows for situations where multiple versions of a collection are in use, or for collections that require peer dependencies.

The same behaviour is currently not present in architect builders. Those are only resolved in the folder the angular.json file is in, making certain situations impossible.

A very specific case: I've got a repository that contains tooling, and I'm using typescript 4.2 for this repo. I'm using the angular CLI to configure the projects in the repo, with a homebrew architect builder to create npm packages to run in node.
Now I want to add an angular application to the repo to test packages in the repo, as the tool in question is @ngx-playwright/jest, meant for using Jest and Playwright to run e2e tests.
However, building the angular app only works if I install @angular-devkit/build-angular in the root package.json file, which requires @angular/compiler-cli, @angular/compiler, @angular/core, rxjs and zone.js as well. It also requires typscript@>= 4.0 < 4.2 which clashes with the 4.2.3 that I'm using throughout the repo.

Note: I'm using a package manager that doesn't hoist dependencies (i.e. the behaviour of yarn 2's pnp linker or pnpm)

Describe the solution you'd like

I'd like to be able to install @angular-devkit/build-angular in the test application's folder instead of the repo root. This package.json already contains all necessary peer dependencies and it can use 4.1 without me having to downgrade typescript throughout the entire repo.

Describe alternatives you've considered
  • Use a package manager that hoists dependencies. This allows for installing the @angular-devkit/build-angular package in the test app's folder while it'll still end up in the root node_modules so the angular CLI can find it. It will still find the wrong version of typescript though, so I'm still stuck.
  • Downgrade my repo to typescript 4.1: this might be possible, but it feels very wrong that the one angular app in the repo should define the typescript version being used to build the node packages throughout the entire repo as well as the typescript language server version used by VS Code.
  • Create a separate angular.json in the test app's folder. This is the solution I'm going for, but if I have multiple angular.json files I'm losing a lot of the ergonomics the angular CLI normally offers.
Dominant language
TypeScript
Stars
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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