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Npm Including all range of pre-release when defining peer-dependency

I am maintaining an NPM package (lets say it as package-A) that relies on an another NPM package(package-B) to function. Therefore, I am in need to add that package as peer-dependency into the package.json, so that npm and the user can be sure that everything is correct.

The problem is, package-B use pre-release versioning. I am well aware that it uses semver wrong, but I am not able to change the company policy, yet. Meanwhile enforcing to use proper versioning will happen. The semantic is like this:

  • 1.0.1-alpha.X -> Unstable releases for testing and bleeding edge content
  • 1.0.1-beta.X -> For every seemingly stable version (like rc)
  • 1.0.2 -> When the package is production ready.

So basically, the patch version increases when there is another production release.

Case: Because of the versioning, I need to include every package except major one to match as peer dependency, together with pre-releases.

The need is basically ^1.0.0 with everything including pre-releases that happens to have 1 as major as peer dependency

  • ^1.0.0 -> Does not include pre-releases
  • ^1.0.0 || >=1.0.0-beta.X -> Does not include e.g. 1.0.1-beta.1
  • * -> Does not include pre-releases
  • ^1.0.0 || >=1.X.X-beta.X -> Does not work.

On semver, there is a parameter called --include-prerelease which I think does what I need, specific to semver commands obviously.

react package on NPM has similar versioning system with proper usage of pre-release. E.g. it has 16.0.0, 16.0.0-alpha.1 and 16.6.0-alpha.0. I basically need to include all this on a single range.

Disclaimer: Minor version is changed when there is a breaking change going on. Yet again, I am well aware that this versioning is not up to semver regulations and advising it unfortunately will not solve the problem at hand.

Solution

  • https://classic.yarnpkg.com/en/docs/dependency-versions#toc-pre-release-tags

    If a comparator includes a version with a pre-release tag it will only match against versions that have the same major.minor.patch version.

    You can only include pre-releases of specific versions.

    >=1.0.0-beta includes 1.0.0-beta.X, but not 1.0.1-beta.X

    You can play around with the semver pre-release ranges on https://semver.npmjs.com/ Lookup the package @artsy/reaction they have bunch of pre-releases