install npm packages as part of build

ocsigen / ocsigen-start

Ocsigen-start: Higher-level library to develop Web and mobile applications with users, (pre)registration, notifications, etc.

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install npm packages as part of build #302

Closed agarwal closed 7 years ago

agarwal commented 7 years ago

I keep hitting errors due to missing npm packages. First issue was that postcss wasn't installed. I installed that, then updated the Makefile as needed. Then I got errors about sassc and autoprefixer not being found.

You might want to consider the Makefile I used for cufp.org. The main points are:

Assume all NPM packages will be installed locally within the repo, thus eliminating any assumptions about the users global NPM state.
Define paths to all executables up at top, e.g. postcss=node_modules/.bin/postcss.
Define rules to install 3rd party packages. See the section so titled.
Add NPM packages as pre-requisites to rules needing them, e.g. see the rule for generating site/css/app.css.

The net result is that a simple make does a lot more to help people get started.

dannywillems commented 7 years ago

I'm on it @agarwal. Thanks for the proposition. I will consider your solution.

balat commented 7 years ago

What do we do with this? I just installed OS on a fresh system. It is too difficult to find out how to install npm dependencies ...

agarwal commented 7 years ago

It is too difficult to find out how to install npm dependencies

How so? You just type npm install foo. Or do you mean installing npm itself?

balat commented 7 years ago

I mean that in the current state, it is difficult for a beginner to understand that he must install npm, what is npm, and then which npm package to install. :) We are trying to make Ocsigen Start very easy to use for very beginners ;)

agarwal commented 7 years ago

I'm a beginner to the JavaScript ecosystem, so my suggestions come with that caveat. I've read some blogs that criticize npm, but from what I can tell npm is the opam of JavaScript. Everybody uses it. So I thought npm is a reasonable prerequisite even for beginners. I could definitely be wrong.

What's the alternative? Right now a beginner has to figure out how to install postcss and then sassc and so on. A beginner is still stuck.

agarwal commented 7 years ago

then which npm package to install

Assuming npm is installed, my proposal eliminates this issue. The point is the Makefile would install all the necessary npm packages automatically.

balat commented 7 years ago

Indeed. I like your suggestion. It's one of the very least things to do before 1.0. There is a PR that is still not merged ... 🙂

agarwal commented 7 years ago

I should point out that NPM version 3 changed the way it organizes the node_modules directory. See https://github.com/npm/npm/releases/tag/v3.0.0, section “Flat, flat, flat!”. Unfortunately, the directory structure is now non-deterministic. For instance, if you do npm install foo and you end up with node_modules/foo, there is is no guarantee node_modules/foo will remain as it is. Subsequently doing npm install bar might completely change the contents of node_modules/foo.

In my own code, I've gotten around this by having my Makefile install all npm packages at once. Then I can rely on the directory structure being a certain way. However, this seems fragile. At the least my code now requires npm > 3 (which is easy for me to satisfy internally), but maybe not great for a public project.

agarwal commented 7 years ago

Another option to consider is to download all JavaScript packages with curl/wget. Then you you know exactly what you're getting and can control exactly where specific files go. Downside is you lose the benefits of a package manager. You have to know all the packages you want to install and their dependencies. Even if you figure it out once, you'll have to redo the work every time you want to upgrade to newer versions of JavaScript packages.