Support bundleDependencies with `nx release`

[kentcdodds]

• [ ] I'd be willing to implement this feature (contributing guide)

Description

I would like nx release to support bundleDependencies.

Because in npm workspaces, some of the node_modules are hoisted to the top directory, when running the publish script those aren't in the directory where you're publishing so they won't be bundled.

Motivation

Without this feature then it violates the principle of least surprise because bundleDependencies is a feature of npm publish and it seems like this would be a missing feature.

Suggested Implementation

Make it easy to copy all the appropriate node_modules into the proper directory before publishing

Alternate Implementations

I'm going to script this myself (wish me luck), but having something built-in would be nice!

[kentcdodds]

In case it's helpful, here's my release script which now should handle this properly: https://github.com/epicweb-dev/kcdshop/blob/42a29726911ecfc3b538079635042e5e87bfc86d/other/release.ts

I'm sure I'm missing things, but maybe this will work ok? One downside is it makes my releases take much longer. So it would be cool if I were more surgical about which packages get copied, but that would require tracing dependencies so that would be tricky.

I do think that I can improve this by only copying things over if the package has bundleDependencies configured...

[JamesHenry]

I'll need to think more about this one but my instinctive reaction is that npm should support this within npm workspaces, rather than it being an Nx specific concern.

There is a long standing issue open about it: https://github.com/npm/cli/issues/3466

Therefore, at least initially, having it be something that is part of a release script does seem to make sense to me (and note, this is particularly necessary for the use-case of publishing from "dist" (in your case the publish/ directory), for some other cases of publishing from source, perhaps all the bundledDependencies would already be in the project directory, although again because of npm workspaces being a thing, not necessarily...)

With that said, perhaps we could do more by providing the copying utility from the programmatic API so that folks could trivially wire it up instead of having to reinvent what you have done here.

I'll keep you posted!

[kentcdodds]

Thanks!

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it hasn't had any activity for 6 months. Many things may have changed within this time. The issue may have already been fixed or it may not be relevant anymore. If at this point, this is still an issue, please respond with updated information. It will be closed in 21 days if no further activity occurs. Thanks for being a part of the Nx community! 🙏

[kentcdodds]

I'd still love this