Patching npm modules with patch-package

When nobody wants to merge a PR in time....

A couple weeks ago, I updated a package. expo-router to be specific.

For some reason nobody wanted to merge a simple fix for a console warning that keeps appearing incorrectly.

When this happens you have a few options

Use a different module

This isn’t ideal unless you are using a very simple npm package, but it’s something you can do if alternatives exist.

Patch the current package

Doing this in 2023 is incredibly easy, some package managers even have built in support. To keep this short and simple, I’ll just explain how to use the patch-package npm module.

If you are using yarn 1:

yarn add patch-package postinstall-postinstall

npm:

// add this to package.json

"scripts": {
  "postinstall": "patch-package"
}

// then
npm i patch-package

Yarn 2:

Use yarn-patch natively: https://yarnpkg.com/cli/patch

Patching Expo Router

For this problem, someone found the exact location of the problem and made a PR, it just didn’t get merged when I needed it fixed. They left a comment here.