package.json: generating a package.json for release

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I am developing a library that I want to release as a node package and I am building the library using the webpack build system. I have a package.json and a package-lock.json that are commited to the repository. The webpack build is producing a set of compiled and bundled artifacts and assets into a dist folder that make up the library that I want to release.

My assumption is, that when I release the compiled and bundled library to an npm repository, that the developers who consume the package do not want to rebuild the library and thus do not need to download any of the dependencies or devDependencies of the library since I am shipping the compiled output of the library in the package that I release.

This means that during the npm publish step, I need to have a package.json that has removed the dependencies and devDependencies fields. Otherwise, developers who depend on my library will receive all these dependencies when they run npm install into their workspace resulting in extra overhead.

Is there a best-practice on how to generate a new package.json out of the checked-in version that removes these fields and places them into the dist folder before release?

I can think of many ways to do this such as:

  • Using the webpack build with the copy-webpack-plugin and a transform function to output a new package.json into the dist folder.
  • By adding a custom step to my build pipeline that generates a modified package.json into the dist folder.
  • By committing a separate package.json into a subfolder that use used specially for release and automatically copy that into the dist folder at release time.

I am wondering if there is some commonly accepted best-practice way on how to do this or if the npm tooling already has support for that use-case build-in?

npm webpack node.js
1 Answers

Answer

I have not seen any standard way. All the ways you propose are aiming to generate a new and clean package.json and there is nothing wrong with that. I guess what you can see weird is the generation of a new package.json. Don't worry, it's quite common but, as far as I know, there are no rules about how to generate the modified copy. However, I would like to share some points of view about your worries.

About devDependencies

If installed from npm repo, the dev dependencies of a dependency will not be installed (or shouldn't) and this should be enough in most cases.

What about dependencies?

Should be included. If you consider that some dependency is not needed in the final dist and only in development, it's a development dependency by definition. Move it to devDependencies array in the package.json.

What about bundled dependencies?

Well, your dependencies should never be bundled or packed and excluded from dependencies. You can but this goes against the purpose of npm and similar package managers, losing the advantages related to dependencies modularity, caching and version control. If you want to force the distribution of some files because you are working with modified third party libraries or other reasons to have absolute distribution control, you maybe should at least take a look to bundledDependencies key in the package.json.

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