Link Protocol

How link dependencies work in Yarn.

The link: protocol lets you connect your project to an external directory.

yarn add imgs@link:./static/imgs

Links vs portals#

Since the target referenced by link: may not exist until postinstall scripts have run, and since Yarn guarantees a predictable behavior regardless of the execution order, we need to disambiguate packages (which contain package.json files, and may list dependencies of their own) from arbitrary folders (which may not).

In practice, this means that link: dependencies are treated as arbitrary folders. They may point to folders that contain a package.json, but Yarn won’t use that manifest to resolve dependencies or run package scripts. If you need to symlink to a package with its own dependency metadata, use portals instead.