I've got quite some experience in (web) development (Java, ASP.NET and PHP amongst all), and fairly new to React and Node JS.
Although I did multiple tutorials and read multiple articles, I feel like I'm missing some point here and there. Currently I'm working on a React app which implements a nice HTML template I found.
One React tutorial I did used Webpack for building and deploying the app (local). This works nice, does the job of transpiling ES6 (.jsx) and SASS using babel. So far so good :)
My template has an image slider (Owl Carousel), so I installed the react-owl-carousel module.
This gave me quite some problems with jQuery (also installed as a module).
After several attempts to fix this I decided to move on to another slider module, React Awesome slider.
I used the module as the README.md explained. But upon building it (npm run build), I got an error that the .scss file within react-awesome-slider could not be transpiled. A message like "are you missing a loader".
So I installed sass, node-sass, sass-loader etc etc and configured these in my webpack.config.js.
I also noticed the react-awesome-slider module within node-modules contained a webpack.config.js.
Long story so far, sorry, now to the essence of this question.
In what way can the modules installed (like react-awesome-slider) be considered "black boxes"?
It doesn't feel logical that all the modules get build when building the main app. The "exclude: /node_modules/," config in webpack.config.js prevents this, not?
So why does the react-awesome-slider give an error about .scss transpiling? I had no .scss rule in my webpack config then.
Will all dependend modules automatically get installed when installing a new module? So when I run "npm i react-awesome-slider --save-dev", will its dependencies also be installed? Or is this not necessary? And do I need to update (webpack) configuration after installing a new module? Or is it really black box and "self-containing"?
Any help would greatly be appreciated!!! Maybe there is a good react-webpack sample app on Github or something like that?
That also confusing me for a really long time. Here are some answers to your question.
people publish packages to the NPM, so a module your project depends on
can be pre-builded or source code, it depends. I have checked react-awesome-slider, it's main field in package.json is dist/index.js, directly import it won't cause an issue because there are no SCSS files.If you follow the CSS module usage instruction you have import react-awesome-slider/src/styles and you will find src/styles.js file import ../styled.scss,so webpack will load it with SCSS loader which you have not configured, that's why an error occurred.
while you install modules, npm will go
through its dependency tree, install its dependencies, dependencies'
dependencies, until there's no more dependency module to install. before npm 3.0 the node_module folder is tree structure reflects the dependency tree, but it causes problems that many modules relay on the same dependency, npm will download and save too many same files, after version 3.0 it becomes flat(release note here, search flat keyword).
You don't need to update your webpack config after you install a dependency cause webpack build process will handle it with file dependency tree. You have installed a package and import it in your activation code, file there will be handle( with its package.json main field file as an entry), you have installed a package without using it or import it in a dead file(dead file means you cannot find it from webpack entry file), it will be ignored by webpack as it's dead code.
I have too many confuse until I read npm docs. Good luck to you.
Node modules are build to execute packages.When the are compiled they have proper configuration to handle extensions that are imported in it and when you import something like .scss in your main app then it does not know about that extension then your webpack need rules to include that extensions.
It does exclude node_modules as the are pre-converted pr pre build.
More over webpack is bit tough so developers create CRA Have look at it.
I'm bundling a bunch of components I regularly use in apps I create with Next.js into an npm package to make it easier to reuse them between projects, however I'm having difficulty getting it to work.
The big issue I have is that some of my components need to import/require a configuration file from the project root directory (e.g. project/node_modules/mypackage/index.[js/jsx/tsx] needs to import/require project/config.[js/ts]) so I need to ensure the app is able to import components from the npm package, and the npm package is able to import/require from the app.
I use Typescript to compile the npm package (no Webpack or Babel) but I'm not sure what settings to use for target, lib, module and jsx, or if I'm able to just keep it uncompiled as .tsx and .ts files (I'm using the canary branch of Next.js which has built-in Typescript support).
I can't find any information in the documentation, here on SO or via Google search. Any advice?
Is it possible to build a TS source into a single file, which would also contain node_modules imported packages' source?
That would be very helpful in a serverless project. I have done this before on a non-TS project but was using webpack (for another reason).
It seems this was briefly possible before but was due a bug https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript/issues/13414 ?
You will need to use a bundler such as webpack to bundle your compiled code and all your node_modules dependencies. The TypeScript compiler (tsc) just transforms TypeScript code into JavaScript, and won't deal with bundling.
I put some common code in this local module called 'client-common'. In one of the app project using this common module, I add this to package.json dependencies:
"client-common": "../client-common"
After npm install the module gets copied to node_modules. When I run (it's an Ionic project) ionic serve, it builds all fine, but at runtime in the browser I get
Runtime Error
Cannot find module "client-common"
I'm assuming this is a webpack issue? The question is why is the local module treated differently and not bundled at all?
It seems that I was supposed to supply an index.js in the common module. After adding an index.js duplicated from the existing index.d.ts, exporting everything, it just works now.
is good practice to include my modules in node_modules for make require search easy,if not why not?
Explanation:
In node.js cms calipso( https://github.com/cliftonc/calipso)
their modules not inside node_modules: then the include the modules without auto option:
calipso = require(path.join(rootpath, 'lib/calipso'));
vs if it was inside node_modules:
calipso = require('calipso');
node_modules is typically ignored in the version control (GIT, etc) and most of the developers assume that this folder contains only packages listed in the package.json. I can imagine the approach on updating the modules just by removing this folder completely and executing npm install. Considering these I would rather say that keeping own modules in node_modules is not consistent with the node.js workflow.
Update: this is assuming that "my modules" is actually just a set of files. If your modules are "npm" modules, that can be restored by executing "npm install" then this is completely fine to keep them in node_modules.