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A little npm actually goes quite a long way: https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build-tool/ https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-bu

by e12e 6y ago

A little npm actually goes quite a long way: https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build-tool/ https://www.keithcirkel.co.uk/how-to-use-npm-as-a-build-tool... https://github.com/keithamus/npm-scripts-example https://github.com/keithamus/npm-scripts-example Although you should probably prefer yarn these days (concepts should mostly transfer over). As for tranformations/transpiling/minifying... You could use webpack - it is popular, but quite complex. I've found this a decent introduction to understand how it works: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/creating-a-production-ready-webpack-4-config-from-scratch/ https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/creating-a-production-read... The good part about going that route, is that is quite explicit... You might get away with throwing out explicit in favour of convention - by using parcel instead: https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel https://github.com/parcel-bundler/parcel (looks like gh readme is currently best entry point for 2.0 docs).

IshKebab 6y ago
NPM is a pretty awful build tool really. In the only NPM project I work on we write a Python script as the build system, and the NPM scripts call that.
- e12e 6y ago
  Don't really disagree with that. On the other hand, npm/yarn is generally a dependency you can't get away from - so if your needs aren't complex, I'd say in general, you're better off with a simple npm/yarn config, than pulling in another dependency. Of course pulling in python in a python project is free, if python is tightly coupled to the js stuff anyway. Often eg: the front end will be just js/ts - and reusable/useful without any python.
  - IshKebab 6y ago
    Yeah to be honest we don't use Python for anything other than the build system, but it is available on all our systems so it is easy to use, and I couldn't find anything better. I would have liked to be able to use Typescript, but there's no really good simple way to say "Node: compile and execute this typescript file, please don't save the output on disk anywhere, or try to read tsconfig.json or package.json or whatever".
    - e12e 6y ago
      > there's no really good simple way to say "Node: compile and execute this typescript file, please don't save the output on disk anywhere, or try to read tsconfig.json or package.json or whatever". I guess there's no native typescript support for nodejs (so npx is out). Maybe deno can help? https://deno.land/ https://deno.land/ > Supports TypeScript out of the box. Thats clearly a sort of "now you have two problems" type solution - but if there's a desire to stick with ts as a language - it might be helpful? (to drop the python dependency). Ed: hm, there's apparently ts-node : https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node npx ts-node script.ts https://stackoverflow.com/a/33536053 https://stackoverflow.com/a/33536053

by e12e 6y ago

IshKebab 6y ago

NPM is a pretty awful build tool really. In the only NPM project I work on we write a Python script as the build system, and the NPM scripts call that.

e12e 6y ago
Don't really disagree with that. On the other hand, npm/yarn is generally a dependency you can't get away from - so if your needs aren't complex, I'd say in general, you're better off with a simple npm/yarn config, than pulling in another dependency. Of course pulling in python in a python project is free, if python is tightly coupled to the js stuff anyway. Often eg: the front end will be just js/ts - and reusable/useful without any python.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  Yeah to be honest we don't use Python for anything other than the build system, but it is available on all our systems so it is easy to use, and I couldn't find anything better. I would have liked to be able to use Typescript, but there's no really good simple way to say "Node: compile and execute this typescript file, please don't save the output on disk anywhere, or try to read tsconfig.json or package.json or whatever".
  - e12e 6y ago
    > there's no really good simple way to say "Node: compile and execute this typescript file, please don't save the output on disk anywhere, or try to read tsconfig.json or package.json or whatever". I guess there's no native typescript support for nodejs (so npx is out). Maybe deno can help? https://deno.land/ https://deno.land/ > Supports TypeScript out of the box. Thats clearly a sort of "now you have two problems" type solution - but if there's a desire to stick with ts as a language - it might be helpful? (to drop the python dependency). Ed: hm, there's apparently ts-node : https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node https://github.com/TypeStrong/ts-node npx ts-node script.ts https://stackoverflow.com/a/33536053 https://stackoverflow.com/a/33536053