Feature: npm init

[holtwick]

I created a little something to get started with a new estrella project: https://github.com/holtwick/create-estrella

You can now enter:

npm init estrella myproj1

To get started.

If you like the idea, I can also pass the project to you.

Other interesting templates might be:

• Browser library
• Node library
• Simple restarting server, see nodemon like option #7

It might also be nice to have it right inside estrella command line tool itself, like:

estrella -init myproj1

[rsms]

Nice! Thanks for making this. I'm happy to let you maintain it.

Some feedback

Generating two build files seems unnecessary (i.e. build.config.js and build.js). In my opinion there's a "bad" culture in the JS world of creating & requiring a large number of configuration files for every single little tool (e.g. cssnext, prettier, npm, webpack, etc.) With Estrella I want to avoid enforcing that upon people and thus instead of using a configuration-file approach, Estrella instead lets you put together your build script with whatever configuration and other tools you might need. I think it would be better to generate a really minimal single build.js file.

---

I see you've added dependencies listed in package.json to esbuild's "external" list. This is going to be a problem for most people!

i.e.

  external: [
    ...Object.keys(pkg.dependencies ?? {}),
    ...Object.keys(pkg.devDependencies ?? {}),
    ...Object.keys(pkg.peerDependencies ?? {}),
  ],

A key part of the esbuild project is to be a really good bundler and this may prevent a lot of people from bundling libraries, which is pretty common when you "bundle" javascript. I propose that you remove this and instead add a sentence of documentation to the postscript of the "init" action (shown when npm init estrella is run.) For example: "If you don't want to bundle your npm packages, list external modules in 'external: ["modulename", ...]' in build.js."

---

Mentioned above already but worth clarifying: You're making a lot of assumptions about what people want to make. For example jsxFactory: "h" is not common, inline sourcemaps are bad for people who make web sites and target:'es2015' is likely not what you expect out of the box (plus, esbuild does not currently have transformations for a lot of things to fit into es2015.)

Again I recommend that you generate a super simple and minimal build.js, like this:

#!/usr/bin/env node
const { build } = require("estrella")
const pkg = require("./package.json")
build({
  entry: "src/index.ts",
  outfile: pkg.main,
})

:-)

[holtwick]

Thank you very much for the feedback. You are right, the lightness of the setup is the biggest plus. I will adjust that in create-estrella.

Obviously I took the settings from an existing project ;) I separated the config there, because I reused it for a Jest transformer. My build.jest.js file looked like this:

const esbuild = require('esbuild')
const common = require('./build.config.js')

module.exports = {

  // https://jestjs.io/docs/en/troubleshooting#caching-issues
  getCacheKey() {
    return Math.random().toString()
  },

  process(content, filename) {
    let result = esbuild.buildSync({
      ...common,
      sourcemap: 'inline',
      write: false,
      entryPoints: [filename],
    })

    return new TextDecoder('utf-8').decode(result.outputFiles[0].contents)
  },
}

And the package.json contains:

"jest": {
    "transform": {
      "^.+\\.jsx?$": "./build.jest.js"
    },
    "testEnvironment": "node",
    "testPathIgnorePatterns": [
      "node_modules/",
      "dist/"
    ]
},

Do you have an idea how to nicely combine this with Estrella?

---

I might add the special cases as further options for the init script:

• Basic (default, minimal config, 'Hello World')
• Jest
• Node.js server
• NPM module

I'll post an update here once I implemented it.

Thanks again for the great work on Estrella and for clarifying the philosophy behind it.

[rsms]

Regarding the "jest" file:

I'm not familiar with Jest enough to know what to do here.
What I'd try would be to consolidate the estrella build and jest transformer into one file; something like this:

build.js

const { build, file } = require('estrella')

if (module.id != ".") {
  // imported by jest as a transformer
  return module.exports = {
    getCacheKey() { /* ... */ },

    async process(content, filename) {
      await build({
        entry: filename,
        outfile: tempfile
      })
      return file.read(tempfile, "utf8")
    }
  }
}

// running directly -- build product
build({
  entry: "main.ts",
  outfile: "out/app.js"
})

Alternatively just keep the jest transformer separate, maybe in a "misc" directory.

[holtwick]

I fixed create-estrella to use the simple sample you suggested.

More templates will follow and are tracked here https://github.com/holtwick/create-estrella/issues

The module.id trick is neat. Sadly the jest transformer does not support async:

In order to get it work, a synchronous build would be required. It would also be nice to be able to build to a string directly and the handle the result oneself. But I understand if this is out of scope of estrella, even though it would be nice to have ;)

[holtwick]

Here you go, more templates for create-estrella. @rsms, I would love to hear your opinion on the module template: https://github.com/holtwick/create-estrella/blob/master/template-js-module/build.js