specify additional dependencies

[xcoderzach]

it would be awesome if I could specify a list of additional dependencies to bundle, so I could use dynamic requires. i.e.

cjsify "lib/index.coffee",  { additionalDependencies: "lib/models/*.coffee" }

and then I could do

require "./models/" + name + ".coffee"

If you think this is something worth adding I'll make a PR.

[vendethiel]

What about npm link lib/models ?

[xcoderzach]

does the library actually do npm lookups?

[xcoderzach]

to answer my own question, I looked through the source and it doesn't do any npm module lookups, and it wouldn't really solve the problem even if it did, because the dependency traverser still wouldn't find those modules, because there is no static require pointing to them.

[vendethiel]

Whatever is in node_modules/ is correctly required.

[michaelficarra]

@xcoderzach: Yes, require looks through node_modules directories according to the resolution algorithm.

edit: See this test: https://github.com/michaelficarra/commonjs-everywhere/blob/9917fc6153b8c5f50f0354314305c3f84b94247b/test/module-resolution-sync.coffee#L5-L8

[michaelficarra]

@xcoderzach: To address your initial proposal, I'd like to point out that I've received a similar request before. This person had a script that would glob a directory and include all of those files for their side effects. I believe they were test files. While this seemed at first like a perfectly reasonable case, I really wanted this tool to continue working only on a single entry file. It's the only kind of input that makes sense with the bundling model. And I decided that it really was the interface that made the most sense. So you have a few options.

• If, like him, you want to include a bunch of modules for their side effects, just glob the directory with your shell, wrap the filenames in requires, and pass them to cjsfiy on stdin.
• If you want the exported properties in a bunch of globbed modules to be exposed in some way, you need to make a module that depends on them and explicitly specifies how things are put together.
• And finally, if you want to choose between a fixed set of modules to require, make a reference to static requires and choose between them with conditionals or switches. If you have truly dynamic requires in your modules (as in, no way to statically determine what files could possibly be needed), how do you expect to bundle everything that could be required at runtime?

Sorry if some of that was incoherent, it's difficult to make these points with just words. If you need clarification, I can give code examples.

[xcoderzach]

A few clarifications:

1) I'm not actually requiring modules for side effects, that was a poor example, it should be more like

Model = require("./models/" + modelName)

2) my use case is as follows:

I have a directory with backbone models at app/models, here's an example

class User extends BaseModel
  @one "post"

I have a library that takes this and creates an associated model when the response from the server is loaded.

The associated model (the user's post) will be constructed with the result of require("./models/post") which I dynamically require behind the scenes with Model = require("./models/" + modelName).

3) As to your third point, I could bundle everything that could be required at runtime by specifying a list of files or file globs, additionalDependencies, to "wrap", even though there aren't static references to to the files.

Every file that matched the glob would have to be included, and have it's dependencies traversed. Any dynamic requires would be ignored by the dep traverser, and we could assume that any dependency that you expect to require dynamically would be passed in as { additionalDependencies: "lib/models/*.coffee" }. Trying to require anything else in the browser should throw an exception.

tl;dr Everything that could be required at runtime should either be a statically required or listed in additionalDependencies.

It's late, so hopefully this makes sense :-S.

[xcoderzach]

After thinking about this, I think that dynamic requires are probably a code smell, and I'll actually do something like:

Post = require("./models/post")
class User extends BaseModel
  @one Post

Please disregard my previous comments.