Use shortand for gitlab dependencies

[ramiel]

What is the current behavior?
yarn add "gitlab:mygitlabuser/myproject"

gives an error

What is the expected behavior?

Should behave the same as
npm install -S "gitlab:mygitlabuser/myproject"

With npm this is a valid dependency also in package.json, while it doesn't work with yarn. This is actually a simple shorthand for a complete git url and work the same for bitbucket and gist

Please mention your node.js, yarn and operating system version.
node v7.6.0 on Kde Neon (linux 4.4.0-64-generic)

[Daniel15]

Feel free to send a pull request adding this if you like.

[ramiel]

If I have time it'll be a pleasure!

[ramiel]

I investigated and discovered that yarn is totally capable to resolve that kind of dependency references (i.e. gitlab:mygitlabuser/myproject). The problem is, it is not able to download private packages. On the opposite npm is capable of doing it. The problem, I think, is that npm resolves the shorthand into the url

git+ssh://[email protected]/mygitlabuser/myproject.git#<ref>

while yarn transforms it into

 https://gitlab.com/mygitlabuser/myproject.git

and so, it encounters authentication problems because it isn't using ssh.
The yarn codebase is large and I need more time to understand why and where it differs like this from npm. If somebody can have a look at this or give me an hint, it should be appreciated.

[ramiel]

Or maybe that url is only used to get back the ref from the repository. In any case npm does something different to retrieve it.

[hx-markterry]

This line here tries to check to see if accessing a private repo would work over HTTP:

yarn/src/resolvers/exotics/hosted-git-resolver.js

Line 204 in 4fc2fe3

if (await this.hasHTTPCapability(httpUrl)) {

it always seems to pass, if you change it to return false, packages will be installed via git successfully, but will be slower.

I wonder if a "prefer git" CLI option could be used here, or have a better way of checking if a repo is available over HTTP.

Is defaulting shortened git urls to use git by default rather than HTTP a more expected result (although slower)?

[ramiel]

Npm checks http first,for what I can see in the logs,than it fallbacks to git+ssh

[SunnyTam]

suffering same problem

[thedumbterminal]

Working on a PR to solve this issue: #2992

[hx-markterry]

Version 0.23 fixes URLs in the format of github:somecompany/somename.git#v1.2.3 but not URLs in the format of: github:somecompany/somename#v1.2.3.

Seems like a problem with the regex at:

https://github.com/yarnpkg/yarn/blob/master/src/util/git.js#L62

[thedumbterminal]

New PR to allow more git URL formats: #3445

[BYK]

The code around this functionality is quite a lot cleaner now so if anyone wants to give a shot at submitting a PR, now is a great time :)