Default to cli.packageManager when prompting to install

[wSedlacek]

It would be nice if any install prompts made by this extension followed the cli.packageManager option in angular.json

[cyrilletuzi]

While the point you mentioned is valid and should be part of a potential feature PR, I'd like to extend the discussion, because the real issue is that this step should not happen at all in a project where Angular CLI is installed. Supporting all package managers would require more than that.

Currently, the extension search packages, and so @schematics/angular collections, in a quite simple and more importantly manual way, by looking into node_modules/packagename or in a parent/ancestor node_modules.

There is several reasons to that:

1. the extension could have its own internal @schematics/angular, but this solution has several issues:

• it would need a publish/update of the extension on each Angular patch updates,
• latest schematics may not work in older Angular versions,
• unfortunately @schematics/angular is not built as a production dependency but as a development dependency, which means it is not self-dependent and has a lot of sub-dependencies (more than 40), which would have many consequences for this extension (bundle size, security risks...).

2. usually a Node program do require('@schematics/angular') to find packages, but in the case of a VS Code extension it looks into the extension node_modules, not inside the user's project node_modules.

3. Even just for npm, I didn't find a lib or an automated solution to find a package at runtime and from a custom folder, following the official module resolution of the packager.

The right solution to this issue would be to solve the last point. I think there should be somewhere a tool for that (otherwise how Node and package managers themselves would do it?), but it's hard to find as it's an edge case so not documented.

[cyrilletuzi]

Hi @wSedlacek, just to let you know the latest version (v6) of the extension does not rely on node_modules anymore.