Proposal: .gitignore dist/

[jjeff]

Having the dist/ directory in Git makes pull requests unnecessarily confusing and unwieldy.

I'm guessing that 98% of users are using WebMidi from the npm package. I propose:

1. Remove the dist/ directory from the Git repository - as the first commit
2. Then add dist/ to the .gitignore file - as the second commit

Then you'd have a workflow where the dist/ directory gets built locally before testing and/or publishing to npm. But there wouldn't be a lot of diff craziness in pull requests or commits.

[djipco]

Yes, I agree.

The only drawback is for those who just want to grab the IIFE version and run with it. I guess that, in such a case, they could simply retrieve webmidi.iife.js from JSDelivr.

We should adapt the Installing manually section of the documentation to reflect the change.

[jjeff]

I don't have much experience with this, but I think you could do process with GitHub Releases similar to npm publish. So there would be a .zip containing the npm-like content that people could download from GitHub. I'll bet there's a CLI tool for this somewhere.

[Vexcited]

Hello, I want to help for this issue !

I've already forked the project and made some modifications.

• I added dist to .gitignore
• I removed every commit lines in scripts and removed the "build and commit" scripts in package.json.

Now for the releases (to use manually with .zip), I think we could rewrite current script in scripts/release/release.js to, instead of commit the dist folder, release the dist folder to GitHub Releases.

[djipco]

Your help is very much appreciated! Merci!

If we are going to rework this, we probably should look at Release It!. It simplifies several of the necessary steps involved when releasing a new version. It would, amongst other things, allow us to create a GitHub tagged release which means the instructions in the Installing Manually section of the documentation would stay the same.

Even if it's an interactive tool, it can still be used programmatically.

[Vexcited]

Even if it's an interactive tool, it can still be used programmatically.

From what I've seen, I don't think we should do something programmatic anymore if we're using this tool because we can define a release-it configuration directly in our package.json and then call their release-it command in the NPM scripts.

Also, we need a GitHub token to programmatically release to GitHub Releases, so I think we should use the interactive way in the NPM scripts to override this (and use the browser release way as it says in the GitHub Releases part of the library)

Let me know what do you think about it !

[djipco]

From what I've seen, I don't think we should do something programmatic anymore if we're using this tool because we can define a release-it configuration directly in our package.json and then call their release-it command in the NPM scripts.

If everything can be configured in package.json, that's the way to go.

Also, we need a GitHub token to programmatically release to GitHub Releases, so I think we should use the interactive way in the NPM scripts to override this

Setting a token isn't hard to do but I guess we should experiment to see what works best.

[Vexcited]

Okay, I'll try to implement that.

For the token, it's just about setting GITHUB_TOKEN in environment when the script is running.

More informations about it here, says that we can use dotenv and a .env file. Guess that would be the easiest and fastest way to implement the feature.

[djipco]

Guess that would be the easiest and fastest way to implement the feature.

Yes, exactly!

[djipco]

Thanks to @Vexcited and his work on PR https://github.com/djipco/webmidi/pull/254, this has been implemented. I had to create a few releases to nail down all the details but it seems stable now.

P.S. Users who want to download the library manually can still go to the latest release page.