We have a React App which uses some components written by us and published to our internal npm repository. Our code is maintained in Bitbucket Data Center, the build is done with Bamboo and the npm repository is hosted in JFrog Artifactory. We work with feature branches and pull requests for developing new features.
It happens often that a new feature in the app, requires a change in the component. In this case, each repository (the App and the component) will have its own feature branch and pull request. Many times the component interface changes, so that the App needs the pull request version of the component and not the mainline one to build and to be tested.
The build is done exclusively by the build server, so that the bundled javascript files are not committed to git.
Let's say the component has version 1.0.0. A new feature in the App needs a change in the component. In this case, the component version will incremented to 1.0.1. We don't want to publish it to Artifactory, until version 1.0.1 is tested, but at the same time, the build of the new App version needs the changes from version 1.0.1.
Our current solution is to change the package version of the component during the build of feature branches to something like 0.<Ticket #>.<Build #>. This 0.x.x version will be published to Artifactory so that the App feature branch can use it to compile.
We use 0.x.x so that the version is never bigger than the current released version. Once the component is merged to the main branch, it will compile with the right version (1.0.1) and will be published to Artifactory again.
I find this solution cumbersome, it requires some funny build scripts, making sure that the branch name always follows some convention and teaching developers about it.
I wonder if there is a better way for managing pull requests and feature branches using npm, without having to manipulate the package.json during build time, depending if it is a feature branch or the main branch.
Sounds like you are using artifactory like a secondary version / staging for the npm package, just use npm?
I am not in devops, but have worked on a few packages, testing a package that has not been released does not sound like testing the package - what about using a beta tag npm publish --tag beta, pulling that into your app npm i package@beta then testing your application in a staging environment?
As i expect you know if you apply a tag then the tag would need to be specified to be pulled into a repo so you can use it to deter users from using that version of the package - an i believe you can delete versions later if you are dead set on not having it public.
Here is a medium article which may be helpful?