How to consume a package from a pnpm monorepo fork?

[KazimirPodolski]

Fairly common use-case: there is a pnpm monorepo and you need to make changes in one of the packages, and consume it in your project instead of the upstream version. Naturally, you fork it, do the changes, but how do you use the package in your project then?

Complications:

1. Target package might have some catalog: and/or workspace: dependencies
2. Naturally, not all packages in the monorepo might be published to npm, since the workspace: usage doesn't require it and it's part of the appeal
3. There might be a root-level build script needed to properly build the package of your interest

For example, you want to change @livekit/components-react from https://github.com/livekit/components-js. Naively consuming it with something like "@livekit/components-react": "github:KazimirPodolski/components-js#path:/packages/react" won't work:

 ERR_PNPM_WORKSPACE_PKG_NOT_FOUND  In ..: "@livekit/components-core@workspace:*" is in the dependencies but no package named "@livekit/components-core" is present in the workspace

[Omrigotlieb]

A GitHub subdir dependency usually won’t be enough here if the forked package still depends on unpublished workspace: packages.

The key bit from the pnpm docs is that workspace: only resolves inside a local workspace, and pnpm refuses to resolve it from anywhere else. So if the forked package depends on sibling packages through workspace:*, consuming only #path:/packages/react won’t work unless those sibling packages are also present in the same workspace.

In practice the reliable options are:

1. clone the fork locally and consume the whole workspace via local/workspace/file linking, or
2. build/pack/publish the packages you need from the fork and depend on those artifacts instead.

So the fix is usually “consume the whole forked workspace”, not “install one package from a monorepo subpath”.

[KazimirPodolski]

Option 1 would complicate CI build, but it's a solution. Option 2 is what I'm doing now, but it's less than perfect too.

Maybe there exists some magic prebuild script to make pnpm consume and build the whole repo, then pick the package?..