Stop cypress from downloading & unpacking every time

[tschaka1904]

Is this a Feature or Bug?

Bug

Current behavior:

When I run npm install cypress everything works nicely 👍 But when I redo the command it is not picking up on the fact that it is already installed and unpacked, which can cost a lot of time.

Desired behavior:

Cypress not downloading and unpacking itself when there is already a cypress folder.

How to reproduce:

npm install cypress on an existing project where cypress is installed already.

[Konstruktour]

Recommendation: use yarn - dont have the problem there.

[brian-mann]

@tschaka1904 I don't think there's anything we can do about this. npm nukes the node_modules/cypress folder on reinstall which means it lost the binary.

We do have a proposal open for caching the binary outside of the node_modules folder which would prevent needing to re-download and unzip it if it's already been cached.

I'm closing this as a duplicate of #1300 and #1233.

[tschaka1904]

I've switched to yarn, which solved that issue. 👍

[brandonmp]

wanted to chime-in since I landed here trying to figure out why yarn was rebuilding cypress from scratch every time I ran yarn add x :/

though it looks like a fix for that should be landing in yarn soon

[mathiasrw]

Still having this issue even using yarn. yarnpkg/yarn#932 (comment) says

if a package deletes it's own files (why oh why do they do these things 😿) and yarn doesn't track that anywhere (we track what files are created or modified), so it just thinks the package is missing files and rebuilds it.

Could that be the key?