npm: Replacing one package from dependencies with a fork (possibly using git)

Question

I'm using terser, which requires esprima. Esprima has been abandoned, so I'd like to replace it with the fork esprima-next. However, no method which I've used to do this has been successful.

Attempt 1:

"devDependencies": {
    "esprima": "npm:esprima-next"
},

This installs without error, but the contents in node_modules/esprima are unchanged.

Attempt 2:

"devDependencies": {
    "esprima": "github:node-projects/esprima-next"
},

This results in the following:

npm ERR! code 128
npm ERR! An unknown git error occurred
npm ERR! command git --no-replace-objects ls-remote ssh://[email protected]/node-projects/esprima-next.git
npm ERR! ssh -oStrictHostKeyChecking=accept-new: line 1: ssh: not found
npm ERR! fatal: Could not read from remote repository.

Attempt 3:

"devDependencies": {
    "esprima": "git+https://github.com/node-projects/esprima-next.git"
},

This results in the same error as the second attempt.

How can I replace one dependency with a fork?

Update 1:

I found that I can install esprima-next under the esprima name and directory by pointing to the tarball for esprima-next.

npm show esprima-next

... get the tarball URL from the output

npm install --save esprima@https://registry.npmjs.org/esprima-next/-/esprima-next-5.8.1.tgz

This works, in that node_modules/esprima/ contains the right code. However, packages like requirejs and terser seem to bundle esprima in their own code, and so I still can't get them to use esprima-next.

Answer 1

Try using resolutions in your package.json.

devDependencies: {
  terser: ^5.0.0,
  ....
},
resolutions: {
   "esprima": "git+https://github.com/node-projects/esprima-next.git"
}