If you encounter a problem with an external NPM package in an Ember project, make sure everyone is running the correct package version.
Today, one of our web application developers was helping a new colleague set up our Ember project and found an issue with one of the NPM packages. We use ember-simple-auth for authenticating users in the app and we didn’t pin it to the exact version in the `package.json` file - it was `^1.1.0` in our case. When the new team member ran `npm install`, he got a newer version (`1.2.0`) - different from what everyone else had. The authors of that new version added ember-cli-import-polyfill, which broke imports in our add-ons.
We have a specific use case as we share common code between the app and our chrome extension using `ember addons`. These addons contain some other 3rd party add-ons and `ember-cli-import-polyfill` broke imports for us. We immediately reported that on the `ember-simple-auth` issue page. It turned out that the import polyfill is for Ember apps, not Ember add-ons. Hopefully it will be removed from `ember-simple-auth` on the next release - for now we pinned it to `1.1.0` in the repo.
The moral of today’s battle: always pin external NPM package’s version in your `package.json` file :).
We hope you enjoyed today’s Developers’ Notes, delivered for your reading pleasure by Łukasz, iRonin’s Web Application Development Team Leader. There’s more coming soon, so stay tuned!
