bigpack bundle up recursive dependencies of a NPM packge

Deprecation Warning

Two things that make me think this project is actually a stupid idea.

One reason is a misunderstanding that cost me several days: There was a regression in NPM that completely confused me. In fact, npm pack is actually supposed to include the recursive dependenceis of all bundledDependencies. It just wasn't working correctly in the particular version I was using.

The second reason is that I recently came to understand that my approach of creating an entirely new package instead of modifying the original one was a flawed one to begin with. My (valid, I think) motivation was to avoid conflicts with the original package. But creating a separate package (with a separate name) causes all sort of other difficulties (see Issues #2 and #3).

Realizing that simply adding the direct dependencies to the list of bundledDependencies solves most if not all of my problems, I see not much point in going through all the trouble. I will instead try something arround the lines of bundled-dependencies and let it update my package.json file on every build. The only thing I might be inclined to add is checking if updating the file is necessary at all.

This tool solves a very particular use case:

I have a production environment running some variant of MS Windows. Networking policies are rather restrictive, in particular I cannot connect to the NPM registry.

I use a mix of published and private NPM packages.

I cannot publish those private NPMs and I do not want to run my own registry.

To install a package on production, I want to create a single bundle that creates that package aswell as the transitive closure of all its dependencies. I want this bundle to be an npm pack file itself, so I can use the npm executable to unpack and install it in production.

This is clearly not the most elegant solution. If you solveds a similar problem in a different way, please drop me a note.

Yet another one?

There are different solutions. npmbox in particular does not look bad at all, but it seems it has a slightly different focus. Or maybe I didn't completely understand how it was inteded to work. Anyway, what I needed seemed simple enough, so I tried it myself, also to get a better understanding of the problem itself.

Install

You could install it globally via npm install -g bigpack. However, I prefer adding it as a dev-dependency to whatever package I want to bundle up.

bash npm install --save-dev bigpack 

Then you can add a script entry in your package.json to actually use the script.

Usage:

There isn't much of a CLI right now. Assuming you are at the root of the project you want to bundle, just run bigpack. It will take a moment (no progress indication, sorry!) and then create a file <project-name>-bigpack-<version>.tgz.

You can install this file via npm install. Note that npm install will try to connect to the registry, even if you run it with --no-registry. It does not need anything from the registry, though. It will just sit there waiting for the connection to timeout, and then it will continue normally.

To escape this madness, here is what I usually do:

npm --fetch-retries=0 install <project-name>-bigpack-<version>.tgz

As I said: there may be more elegant solutions...