Why is babel failing to resolve plugins/presets?

[conartist6]

I'm sorry this is going to be a big vague. I'm really confused. This was all just working perfectly, but I installed a pnpm@7 alpha build so I could contribute to pnpm itself and when I tried to put everything back it seems that this is broken. I'm guessing this was a footgun that I shot myself with, as I had installed pnpm via brew (I'm on a mac), and I think I had it in-place upgrade itself which was probably a bad idea but I'm not sure I had another option.

I've tried wiping away the package cache and node_modules, but it was not enough.

As far as babel itself, its failure seems to be caused by straight up looking in the wrong place. I have package which requires compilerPackage which calls babel with various plugins and presets. But babel is starting its search in package instead of compilerPackage, which means it will never find anything since pnpm doesn't do hoisting like that.

[conartist6]

Self-discussion

[conartist6]

I tried wiping everything away again including ~/.pnpm-state this time, and I ran pnpm setup to get the global modules directory sorted and none of that changed the behavior in any way.

[conartist6]

I'm trying to figure out how this is really meant to work, and I'm not even entirely sure of that. I found this blog post which describes pnpm's algorithm, but that's not what I'm seeing...

OK, wait! VScode was fooling me. It was hiding the node_modules directories inside the pnpm virtual store because the IDE compacts folders which only contain one item -- something that can actually be completely invisible when the base folder has a really long name:

In this image actually the directories `/node_modules/@babel` both are appended to the already-long name and are completely invisible.

[conartist6]

So now I again have my original question: why the heck does babel's resolver not start looking for deps in the package it should be called from?

[conartist6]

I think this might be one of those things where the biggest mystery is who the heck it was working previously. It seems to me that the problem is caused by the fact that I'm not specifying my babel configuration in a config file, but rather programatically so babel really just doesn't know where to start resolving those package paths. I would need to tell it with the cwd option

[conartist6]

I was configuring babel's plugins and presets through its javascript API, and the cwd option had not been set correctly. The correct code ended up being:

// lib/index.js
const result = await babel.transform(file, {
  cwd: resolve(__dirname, '..'), // .. escapes from lib
  // ...
}