storybook init: Invalid Version: null

[yannbf]

Error locations:

• automigration duplicated dependencies summary
• init → detect language

Suggested work:

The issue occurs as a result of calling semver.coerce(version) to get the version of a package which looks like one of the following scenarios:

{
  "typescript": "*", // wildcard, common in peerDependency field
  "typescript": "workspace:*", // common in monorepos
  "typescript": "latest", // or any other npm tag
}

This issue relates to the fact that we get package versions by reading a package.json file, which might not be a robust solution. Possible solutions to work on would be:

• Change the way we read package versions by parsing the lock file instead. We could use tools such as nodejs-lockfile-parser for instance.
• Change the way we read package versions by using package managers commands e.g. yarn why <dep>.
• Create a wrapper of semver that deals with the scenario of “invalid” versions and falls back to another mechanism to retrieve the package version, or at least provide a better error message.
• Add error handling around the places where we calculate versions, and gracefully handle the errors if needed (e.g. skip duplicated dependency check rather than crash)