Can you undo a lerna bootstrap?

Question

I've run a lerna bootstrap --hoist. I now want to undo this and unlink all of the created symlinks. Is there a command to do this?

Answer 1

Lerna link (or bootstrap) will create symlinks either directly underneath a node_modules directory or, for packages with an @-scoped name, in a subdirectory with that name. Assuming your packages are all in ./packages/*, Any symlinks directly underneath ./node_modules or in ./packages/*/node_modules. For instance, after bootstrap, lerna has created a couple symlinks to my creatively-named @myscope/foo package:

.
├── lerna.json
├── node_modules
│   └── @myscope
│       └── foo -> ../../packages/foo
├── package.json
├── package-lock.json
└── packages
    ├── bar
    │   ├── node_modules
    │   │   └── @myscope
    │   │       └── foo -> ../../../foo
    │   └── package.json
    └── foo
        └── package.json

I can dig those out with find:

$ find . -type l -and \( -path './node_modules/*' -or -path './packages/*/node_modules/*' \)
./packages/bar/node_modules/@myscope/foo
./node_modules/@myscope/foo

This isn't perfectly selective because it could find symlinks that you created with npm link.

I can use ls -l to dump the source and the symlink target (vs. readlink which would just print the target):

$ find . -type l -and \( -path './node_modules/*' -or -path './packages/*/node_modules/*' \) -exec ls -l {} \;
lrwxrwxrwx 1 eric eric 12 janv.  4 09:46 ./packages/bar/node_modules/@myscope/foo -> ../../../foo
lrwxrwxrwx 1 eric eric 18 janv.  4 09:45 ./node_modules/@myscope/foo -> ../../packages/foo

If you're feeling confident about selectivity, you can -exec rm {} \; to remove them. It's not as good as a built-in undo, but at least it helps you see what lerna did.