plugins:link fails to compile plugins that have typescript as a dependency

[Daniel-Webster]

Summary

Since oclif/plugin-plugins#517 the plugins:link command will always try to run tsc on plugins that contain a dependency of typescript. This breaks linking plugins that have a dependency of typescript installed via NPM or Yarn, since modules published to NPM will in most cases not contain their typescript source code nor their tsconfig.

Steps To Reproduce:

Repository to reproduce: dreamhouse-lwc

NOTE: If your issue is not reproducable by dreamhouse-lwc, i.e. requires specific metadata or files, we require a link to a simple Salesforce project repository with a script to setup a scratch org that reproduces your problem.

1. yarn add --dev sfdx-cli sfdmu
2. yarn sfdx plugins:link ./node_modules/sfdmu

Expected result

SFDX links the sfdmu plugin and I am able to call

sfdx sfdmu

Actual result

sfdx tries to compile the source code in the sfdmu module and fails because there is no tsconfig and no typescript code to compile.

yarn run v1.22.17
$ /Users/klink/Tingle/sfdx-action-container/node_modules/.bin/sfdx plugins:link ./node_modules/sfdmu
sfdx-cli: linking plugin sfdmu... ⣻
sfdx-cli: linking plugin sfdmu... !
    Error: yarn run tsc -p . --incremental --skipLibCheck exited with code 1
error Command failed with exit code 1.

System Information

• Which shell/terminal are you using? (e.g. bash, zsh, powershell 5, powershell 7, cmd.exe, etc.)
  bash
• If you are using sfdx
  • Run sfdx version --verbose --json
• If you are using sf
  • Run sf version --verbose --json
• Paste the output here

Additional information

see
oclif/plugin-plugins#559
and
oclif/plugin-plugins#517

[github-actions]

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[peternhale]

@Daniel-Webster the plugins:link is meant to be used as a developer tool when working on a plugin, not a means to register a plugin add via yarn.

Why not just install sfdmu?

[Daniel-Webster]

We are using plugins:link to install the plugin in a Docker container build. The container is being built by x86 architecture for both x86 and ARM images. During that build using plugins:install results in extremely poor build times (hours) when executing in ARM emulation mode. To get around this we are installing plugins via yarn and copying over the node_modules into the container that we wish to use for sfdx plugin commands executed by the container. Installing in this way also allows us to cache the node_modules folder using our internal build tool.

Anecdotally, plugins:link used in this way has been much more reliable for me for many years since when I first started using this was back when there was no support to install plugins from internal NPM repositories / proxy configuration problems back in the day.

[peternhale]

Let's use oclif/plugins#559 to track this.