Storybook yarn pnp support

[ndelangen]

Hey everyone 👋

Storybook has supported Yarn Plug'n'Play (PnP) since version 6; through custom resolvers, runtime APIs, CLI flags, and extra test coverage. Over time this has proven to be a maintenance burden. However, we've seen few active projects actually use PnP (less than 1%).

For these reasons, we:

1. Deprecated explicit PnP support in SB10 to give our PnP users fair warning. #32645
2. Plan to remove all PnP-specific code as part of SB11.

Many modern tools supports PnP natively, so it's possible that PnP projects will continue to work even after we've removed the code. At some point next year, we will release an SB11 alpha and share that below to give PnP users a chance to test things out.

Based on the response here, the test results in advance of SB11, and our usage telemetry, we'll make a final decision.

Thanks for your understanding!

[prewk]

I will always respect maintenance burden as an argument in OSS. My piece on this:

After using Storybook since 2016/2017 (and building my own crappy version in-house before) throughout React and now Angular, I must say that I'm unhappy with this. Storybook is a tool (a great tool!) that supports a project, not the other way around.

It doesn't make sense to make important decisions such as picking the package manager and its strategies based on one of the supporting development tools within. It brings a sense of tooling hubrus, as if it wants the project it's in to center around it instead of it being a very useful spanner in the toolbox of the project.

With that said, again, I completely understand the burden of maintaining snowflaky stuff. Some final bullets:

• Telemetry might not be telling the whole story, especially within large organizations that has it turned off
• This discussion is extremely hard to find, I couldn't find a single issue talking about this deprecation, I had to find the error message in code -> git blame -> find the PR -> find this
• node_modules/ is awful 😅

I really hope it'll work OOTB once you do this.

[mrginglymus]

I can't speak for the team, but I've contributed a number of Yarn PnP compatibility fixes to various projects including storybook.

Yarn has a few at-first weird behaviours that are easy to deal with so long as you don't go outside the javascript ecosystem. The general move towards creating non-node tooling is going to make this problem worse as module customisation hooks stablise and more tools use them. Similarly, using non-node fs to read files will fail as you don't have the patched zipfs provided by yarn.

However, my experience with storybook is that almost none of these odd behaviours are actually encountered by storybook directly at runtime - they nearly always end up being problems within vite, for which there are usually accommodations/workarounds (e.g. patching the vite:resolve plugin to call pnpapi.resolveVirtual).

The only main problem at runtime is one of ambiguous resolution through dynamic imports of addons. However, this I believe is recognised as a general problem that will affect monorepo users too, so hopefully a more appropriate architecture for registering addons will be forthcoming soon.

Having looked through the deprecation notices, I don't belive that any of the removals will seriously impact yarn pnp users, beyond possibly some degredation of the CLI used to initialise and modify storybook installations. I've actually already removed one of the yarn pnp compatibility bits to improve yarn pnp compatibility :)

[prewk]

That's really comforting to hear, thanks for the insight!

Since I'm on Angular these days I'm also one extra abstraction away from things (Can't run vite, but I have to install random vite packages to make Storybook happy. Also, stuck on legacy playwright integrations..), so it's hard to navigate the problems sometimes.

Every storybook upgrade is a real challenge, with new obscure explosions here and there. I run nx, but their own integrations put another extra layer of abstractions that I'd rather not even have. Argh.

Oh well, hoping for things working further ahead along the line.

[ekeijl]

Any word on whether Storybook 11 + Yarn PnP will be completely broken?

Appreciate the effort that you've put into supporting PnP in the past, but leaving a part of your community with "possible that PnP projects will continue to work" and "just switch your package manager" brings a lot of uncertainty. Documentation on what works and what doesn't would be appreciated.

Upgrading Storybook has been a hassle every major version, currently the docgen is broken on our stack, the easiest fix was to disable it completely... As a user of both Storybook and Yarn, I would rather drop Storybook than switch package manager, since Storybook is a "nice to have" and not a "must have", that's the reality of it.

[ndelangen]

"possible that PnP projects will continue to work" and "just switch your package manager" brings a lot of uncertainty.

You're right, I sympathize, we do not want to create that uncertainty, not do we want to drop support.
What we want is for support to less of a maintenance burden, and if that's not possible, potentially we'd have to make the hard choice of not supporting it anymore at-all.

Firstly we've marked a lot of spots in the storybook repo where pnp support is explicit.
What we're hearing is that many if not all of those explicit points are likely not needed, but we do not know for certain.

Secondly we have added a regression test for pnp support, to ensure it does not accidentally break, as far as such a thing can be ensured; since we're only testing 1 dummy project with 1 version of yarn, configured in 1 certain way; so coverage is moderate, but not nothing.

Our next move was to post this discussion, to provide early signal to our users, and to receive signal back.

It's not certain exactly what will happen when we remove all the pnp supporting code, but we're planning on doing that relatively early in the SB11 roadmap, and use our own integration tests to seek feedback, as well as post in this discussion with alpha version for users to try out.

Upgrading Storybook has been a hassle every major version, currently the docgen is broken on our stack, the easiest fix was to disable it completely... As a user of both Storybook and Yarn, I would rather drop Storybook than switch package manager, since Storybook is a "nice to have" and not a "must have", that's the reality of it.

I hear what you're saying.

We do try to make upgrades as smooth as possible, with the upgrade command, auto-migrations, etc.
The feedback we're hearing is that the experience is improving with every major release, but of course that's anecdotal, and of no use to you personally when you're particularly affected by changes we made.

You, of course, have the option of staying with SB10 for a considerable period; even if SB11 is released without pnp support.

[lukkea]

I agree with this from @ekeijl :

Upgrading Storybook has been a hassle every major version, currently the docgen is broken on our stack, the easiest fix was to disable it completely... As a user of both Storybook and Yarn, I would rather drop Storybook than switch package manager, since Storybook is a "nice to have" and not a "must have", that's the reality of it.

And disagree with this from @ndelangen because the security of Storybook's dependencies may not allow staying on version 10 if version 10 doesn't continue to get security updates:

You, of course, have the option of staying with SB10 for a considerable period; even if SB11 is released without pnp support.

[psychobolt]

With the latest Storybook, ESBuild, and future developement with it, I am personally using SWC which is Rust based and supports PnP with OXC Resolver. This is of course set up through Node register and uses my TS Config setup. I don't see a issue with dropping the Storybook PnP Support if the other 3rd party tools continue to support PnP and when Yarn 6 is going to have experimental PnP support for that: https://yarn6.netlify.app/getting-started/breaking-changes/