Conflicting Type Dependencies

You will sometimes see Duplicate identifier errors when type-checking your application.

An example duplicate identifier error:

yarn tsc --noEmit yarn run v1.15.2
$ /Users/chris/dev/teaching/emberconf-2019/node_modules/.bin/tsc --noEmit
node_modules/@types/ember__object/index.d.ts:23:22 - error TS2300: Duplicate identifier 'EmberObject'.
23 export default class EmberObject extends CoreObject.extend(Observable) {}
~~~
node_modules/@types/ember__component/node_modules/@types/ember__object/index.d.ts:23:22
23 export default class EmberObject extends CoreObject.extend(Observable) {}
~~~ 'EmberObject' was also declared here.
node_modules/@types/ember__component/node_modules/@types/ember__object/index.d.ts:23:22 - error TS2300: Duplicate identifier 'EmberObject'.
8 export default class EmberObject extends CoreObject.extend(Observable) {}
~~~ 
node_modules/@types/ember__object/index.d.ts:23:22
23 export default class EmberObject extends CoreObject.extend(Observable) {}
~~~ 'EmberObject' was also declared here. Found 2 errors. error Command failed with exit code 1.

This occurs whenever your yarn.lock or package-lock.json files include more than a single copy of a given set of type definitions—here, types for @ember/object, named @types/ember__object. See below for details on the package manager behavior, and Understanding the Package Names for details on the package names.

Workarounds

There are currently three recommended workarounds for this:

If using npm, you can use npm upgrade --depth=1 @types/ember__object to upgrade just that specific dependency and anywhere it is used as a transitive dependency of your top-level dependencies. You can also use its npm dedupe command, which may resolve the issue.
If using yarn, you can specify a specific version of the package to use in the "resolutions" key in package.json. For example, if you saw that you had @types/ember__object@3.0.8 from the default package installs but @types/ember__object@3.0.5 from some-cool-ts-addon, you could force yarn to use 3.0.8 like so:
```
  {
    "resolutions": {
      "@types/ember__object": "3.0.8"
    }
  }
```
You can identify the dependencies which installed the type dependencies transitively, and uninstall and reinstall them. For example, if running yarn why reported you had one version of @types/ember__object from the normally-installed set of packages, and one from some-cool-ts-addon, you could run this:
```
  yarn remove @types/ember some-cool-ts-addon
  yarn add -D @types/ember some-cool-ts-addon
```

You may also be able to use yarn-deduplicate, but this does not work 100% of the time, so if you try it and are still seeing the issues, try one of the solutions above.

Understanding the Problem

When you are using TypeScript in your Ember application, you consume Ember's types through DefinitelyTyped, the tool the TypeScript team built to power the @types/* definitions. That tooling examines the dependencies implied by the package imports and generates a package.json with those types specified with a * dependency version. On initial installation of your dependencies, yarn installs the highest version of the package available, and correctly deduplicates that across both your own package and all the @types packages which reference each other.

However, later installs may introduce conflicting versions of the types, simply by way of yarn's normal update rules. TypeScript requires that there be one and only one type definition a given item can resolve to. Yarn actively avoids changing a previously-installed version of a transitive dependency when a newly installed package depends on the same dependency transitively. Thus, if one of your dependencies also depends on the same package from @types/* that you do, and you upgrade your dependence on that type by editing your package.json file and running yarn or npm install again, TypeScript will suddenly start offering the error described in detail above:

Duplicate identifier 'EmberObject'.ts(2300)

Let's imagine three packages, A, B, and C, where A is your app or library, and B and C have the following versions and dependencies:

C is currently at version 1.2.3.
B is at version 4.5.6. It depends on C with a * dependency. So the dependencies key in its package.json looks like this:
```
  {
    "dependencies": {
      "C": "*"
    }
  }
```

Now, you install only B (this is the equivalent of installing just the basic type definitions in your package):

{
  "dependencies": {
    "B": "~4.5.6"
  }
}

The first time you install these, you will get a single version of C – 1.2.3.

Now, let's say that C publishes a new version, 1.2.4, and A (your app or library) adds a dependency on both C like so:

{
  "dependencies": {
    "B": "~4.5.6",
    "C": "~1.2.0"
  }
}

When your package manager runs (especially in the case of yarn), it goes out of its way to leave the existing installation of C in place, while adding a new version for you as a top-level consumer. So now you have two versions of C installed in your node_modules directory: 1.2.3 (for B) and 1.2.4 (for A, your app or library).

What's important to understand here is that this is exactly the behavior you want as the default in the Node ecosystem. Automatically updating a transitive dependency—even when the change is simply a bug fix release—can cause your entire app or library to stop working. If one of your dependencies accidentally depended on that buggy behavior, and adding a direct dependency on the fixed version caused the buggy version to be upgraded, you're just out of luck. Yarn accounts for this by resolving packages to the same version during initial installation, but leaving existing package resolutions as they are when adding new dependencies later.

Unfortunately, this is also the opposite of what you want for TypeScript, which needs a single source of truth for the types in your app or library. When you install the type definitions, and then later install a package which transitively depends on those type definitions, you end up with multiple sources of truth for the types.

Understanding the Workarounds

The solutions listed above both make sure npm apd Yarn only install a single version of the package.

Explicitly upgrading the dependencies or using dedupe resolves to a single version in npm.
Specifying a version in the "resolutions" field in your package.json simply forces Yarn to resolve every reference to that package to a single version. This actually works extremely well for types, but it means that every time you either update the types package(s) yourself or update a package which transitively depends on them, you have to edit this value manually as well.
Uninstalling and reinstalling both the impacted packages and all the packages which transitively depend on them gives you the same behavior as an initial install… because that's exactly what you're doing. The downside, of course, is that you have to identify and uninstall and reinstall all top-level packages which transitively depend on the files, and this introduces risk by way of other transitive dependencies being updated.

PreviousTroubleshooting

Last updated 6 months ago