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Phantom dependencies

Rush's documentation occasionally mentions "phantoms" and "doppelgangers". Want to learn more about how JavaScript package managers work?

Some history and some theory

Everyone knows that software packages can depend on other packages, and the resulting dependency graph is a kind of directed acyclic graph in computer science. Unlike a tree data structure, a directed acyclic graph can have diamond-shaped branches that rejoin. For example, library A might import definitions from libraries B and C, but then B and C can both import from D, which creates a "diamond dependency" between these four packages. Conventionally the programming language's module resolver looks up imported packages by traversing edges of this graph, and (in other systems) the packages themselves are found in a central store that can be shared by many projects.

For historical reasons, NodeJS and NPM took a different approach by representing this graph physically on disk: NPM models the graph vertexes using actual package folder copies, and the graph edges are implied by the subfolder relationships. But a folder tree's branches cannot rejoin to make diamonds. To handle this, NodeJS added a special resolution rule whose effect is to introduce extra graph edges (pointing to the immediate children of all parent folders). From a computer science perspective, this rule relaxes the file system's tree data structure in two ways: (1) it can now represent some (but not all) directed acyclic graphs, and (2) we pick up some extra edges that do not correspond to any declared package dependency. These extra edges are called "phantom dependencies".

NPM's approach has many unique characteristics that differ from traditional package managers:

  • Each (root-level) project gets its own node_modules tree containing lots of package folder copies. Even a very small NodeJS project is likely to have more than 10,000 files copied under its folder.

  • In NPM 2.x, the node_modules folder tree was very deep and duplicated, which minimized phantom dependencies. NPM 3.x improved the installation algorithm to flatten the tree, which eliminated a lot of duplication, at the expense of introducing even more phantom dependencies (extra graph edges). In some cases the new algorithm will also choose a slightly older version of a package (while still satisfying SemVer) to further reduce duplication of package folders.

  • The installed node_modules tree is not unique. There are many possible ways to arrange package folders into a tree to approximate the directed acyclic graph, and there is no unique "normalized" arrangement. The tree you get depends on whatever heuristics your package manager chose to follow. NPM's own heuristics are even sensitive to the order in which you add packages.

The node_modules tree is an unusual and theoretically interesting data structure. But let's focus on three consequences that can cause real trouble, and which can be particularly difficult to diagnose in a large and very active monorepo. We'll also show how Rush improves things -- mitigating these problems was one of the original motivations for creating the Rush tool!

Phantom dependencies

NPM phantom dependency

A "phantom dependency" occurs when a project uses a package that is not defined in its package.json file. Consider this example:

my-library/package.json

{
"name": "my-library",
"version": "1.0.0",
"main": "lib/index.js",
"dependencies": {
"minimatch": "^3.0.4"
},
"devDependencies": {
"rimraf": "^2.6.2"
}
}

But suppose that the code looks like this:

my-library/lib/index.js

var minimatch = require('minimatch');
var expand = require('brace-expansion'); // ???
var glob = require('glob'); // ???

// (more code here that uses those libraries)

Wait a sec -- two of these libraries are not declared as dependencies in the package.json file. How is this working at all!? It turns out that brace-expansion is a dependency of minimatch, and glob is a dependency of rimraf. During installation, NPM has flattened their folders to be under my-library/node_modules. The NodeJS require() function finds them there because it probes for folders without considering the package.json files at all. This is perhaps counterintuitive, but it seems to work just fine. Maybe it's a feature and not a bug?

Unfortunately this project's missing declarations are best considered a bug. It can lead to unexpected malfunctions or errors:

  • Incompatible versions: Although our library's package.json declared that it needs minimatch version 3, we don't have any say about the version of brace-expansion that we'll get. The SemVer system makes it perfectly legal for a PATCH release of minimatch to incorporate a MAJOR upgrade of the brace-expansion library, as long as it doesn't affect the API signature for minimatch. In practice we'll probably never encounter this as developers of my-library -- instead, it will be found by a poor victim who installs our published library later in some very different node_modules arrangement that has newer (or older) version constraints than what we regularly test.

  • Missing dependencies: The glob package is coming from our devDependencies, which means it only gets installed for developers who work on the my-library project. For other consumers, require("glob") should fail immediately with an error because glob won't get installed at all for them. We should hear about it as soon as we publish the my-library package, right? Not exactly. In practice it's likely that most consumers will also have glob for some reason (e.g. using rimraf themselves), so it may appear to work. Only a small percentage of our consumers will encounter the failed import error, making it seem like they're reporting a weird issue that's difficult to repro.

How Rush helps: Rush's symlinking strategy ensures that each project's node_modules contains only its declared direct dependencies. This catches phantom dependencies immediately at build time. If you're using the PNPM package manager, the same protections are also applied to all indirect dependencies (with the ability to workaround any "bad" packages by using pnpmfile.js).

Phantom node_modules folders

Suppose we have a monorepo, and someone adds a root-level package.json file like this:

my-monorepo/package.json:

{
"name": "my-monorepo",
"version": "0.0.0",
"scripts": {
"deploy-app": "node ./deploy-app.js"
},
"devDependencies": {
"semver": "~5.6.0"
}
}

This allows people to run npm run deploy-app, and our script will automatically deploy all the projects in the monorepo. (Don't do this if you're using Rush! Instead define a custom command.) Notice that this hypothetical script needs to use the semver library, so it was added to the devDependencies list. People are asked to run npm install in the repo root folder before npm run deploy-app.

The resulting installed folders will look something like this:

- my-monorepo/
- package.json
- node_modules/
- semver/
- ...
- my-library/
- package.json
- lib/
- index.js
- node_modules/
- brace-expansion
- minimatch
- ...

But recall that NodeJS's module resolver probes for dependencies in parent folders. This means that our my-library/lib/index.js can call require("semver") and find the semver package, even if it doesn't appear anywhere under my-library/node_modules. This is an even more insidious way to pick up accidental phantom dependencies -- it can sometimes find node_modules folders that aren't even under your Git working directory!

How Rush helps: Rush's got you covered. The rush install command scans all potential parent folders and issues a warning if any phantom node_modules folders are found.