Tern not respecting .tern-config in home directory.

[natealcedo]

Tern does not provide auto completion with a custom NODE_PATH when loading a global .tern-config in the home directory. I just did a reinstall of my vim with and am using YouCompleteMe which uses tern. Previous to this installation, I was able to do something like this NODE_PATH=src vim . and I would be able to get auto completions and tern would be able to find files. If I do a :TernDef, the files are not found.

With this reisntall though this is no longer the case and I now have to copy over my .tern-config from my home directory into my project directory as .tern-project to get the same behaviour.

Take a look at these pictures. the Tern config points to the one in my home directory.

No auto complete is provided.

However when I use a local .tern-project.

Things work as usual.

I only noticed this behaviour because I had to setup my computer fresh. I usually save my dotfiles and have a script that copies them over. So on my other machine, everything works perfectly. But on a fresh install it doesnt work.

They are exactly the same file. I just copied it over doing something like this. cat ~/.tern-config >> .tern-project

This is what my current config file looks like

{
  "plugins": {
    "es_modules": {},
    "node": {},
    "modules": {}
  },
  "libs": [
    "ecma5",
    "ecma6",
    "browser"
    ],
    "ecmaVersion": 6
}

[micbou]

That's because we changed which working directory is used by Tern when a .tern-config file is found in PR ycm-core/ycmd#875. The home directory is now used as the working directory (instead of Vim working directory). You need to set NODE_PATH to an absolute path (or to a path relative to your home directory) and things will work.

Honestly, I didn't think of that use case when implementing the changes in PR ycm-core/ycmd#875 (I thought the working directory didn't really matter when a .tern-config was found). I guess we should revert to the old behavior.

[natealcedo]

So for this to work as I expect I just have to do this src=~/pathtoworkingdirectory vim .?

[micbou]

Rather NODE_PATH=/path/to/src vim . where /path/to/src is an absolute path.

[natealcedo]

Ah I see. Is this something that you guys will consider reverting? I use NODE_PATH in my projects which help to make imports easier since I don't have to do deep nested imports and it's a cleaner approach.

[micbou]

Yes. See PR ycm-core/ycmd#886. We are even going to improve the behavior by handling the scenario where the user want to switch to another project without a .tern-project file. This will be possible by changing Vim working directory to that project and restarting the Tern server:

:cd /path/to/another/project
:YcmCompleter RestartServer

Users currently have to restart the ycmd server for this to work:

:cd /path/to/another/project
:YcmRestartServer

[natealcedo]

Ok that is great news. Thanks for the quick response! Looking forward to this PR being merged :)

[natealcedo]

For those who are facing this issue and want a short NODE_PATH that is generic enough you can do something like this provided you open vim in the repo directory NODE_PATH=$(pwd)/src vim .

[natealcedo]

Since the pull request fixing this issue has been merged I'm going to close this issue. Thanks @micbou