The setup:

./company/MyApp  ./company/MyLibrary

The desired workflow would be:

• Working on MyApp using e.g. VSCode
• Having MyLibrary as dependency to MyApp
• Make a change to MyLibrary without having to recompile
• Make a change to MyLibrary without needing any services that detect this change
• MyApp bundles correctly using Metro
• Making changes to MyLibrary whilst the app is running will hot reload the app

What I have tried so far:

Using yarn link or npm link:

• cannot confirm that symlinked dependency is referenced from within the project by looking at the node_modules directory
• read that Metro bundler doesn't recognise symlinks (unconfirmed)
• stopped trying at this point, but can imagine that the dependency would still need to be compiled before changes are available to MyApp

Using WML

Works, but is cumbersome.Installation:

• Install watchman
• Install wml globally using yarn global add wml
• Run watchman watch /Users/[your username]/.config/yarn/global/node_modules/wml/src(or wherever wml is installed
• Run wml add ~/my-package ~/main-project/node_modules/my-package
• Run wml start

Workflow:

• Run cd company/MyApp
• Run wml start
• Run yarn android:run (or whatever your platform and script name is)
• Make changes to MyLib
• Run (cd ../MyLibrary && tsc)
• The app hot reloads with the latest changes from MyLib

However, this workflow doesn't fulfil several desired requirements:

• Make a change to MyLibrary without having to recompile
• Make a change to MyLibrary without needing any services that detect this change

Question:

How can you make changes to a local library from within your main project without having to compile the former or run any services that detect this change?