Improve support for node library/application package management

[gioragutt]

Description

Also described in this reddit comment.

Recently I migrated some of my company's code to an NX repo. It consists of:

• several front-end angular projects, more to be migrated in the future.
• a production node microservice, and several other node-based projects.

Bundling and dockerizing a front-end application is a piece of cake - bundle and you're done.
On the other hand, bundling and dockerizing a node app is a pain.

Since an NX repo only has a single package.json, you need a different mechanism for bundling your dependencies, an example for such is described in this issue, and in issues linked to it.

In the reddit post, I described a problem I had which made me do an even uglier workaround, to do get a node_modules directory in my code, since a library I used (jaeger-client) relied to reading an asset from there.

What I ended up doing was save a list of all dependencies that are specific to node libraries and apps (which is still more than you need, but much less than you would get otherwise) and generate a package.json using this list.

Motivation

I think that there should be a more standard way to bundle/build node applications, such that supports node_modules cleanly. Running the applications locally could work the same as it does now, but another option to bundle it with a proper node_modules should be available.

Suggested Implementation

One thing I thought of would be to generate a package.json as part of the bundling.
In order to generate the package.json, you'd have each node library and application specify its distinct dependencies in a configuration file. It would be just the names of the dependencies, since the versions are specified in the repo-level package.json.

In the build process, since dependencies are known, you could collect all the dependencies from all libraries used, and the built application, and combine it into a package.json.

This package.json is then easily used by a Dockerfile that would copy the package.json, then npm install (or npm ci if we can generate a lock file as well), and then copy the dist files themselves.

Alternate Implementations

I can't think of any non-hacky solutions, but it would revolve around libraries specifying their dependencies, and later a more compact node_modules is created.

If you could take the actual node_modules of the repo, copy it, and curate it to contain only the needed dependencies.

I don't know how the curation process would work, but I also don't know if this would work well with docker layer caching 🤷🏻‍♂️

[reajuria]

Please refer to This link

[gioragutt]

Hey @reajuria, thanks for the tip!

I'm currently not able to test this, so I'm gonna ask instead. When I use this method, do I have to populate the package.json dependencies array(s) myself, or does nx handle this?

Because if it doesn't, it'd mean that I'd still have to manage package.json dependencies separately for this app.
Also, how would mono-repo level dependencies work?

[github-actions]

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[github-actions]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because it hasn't had any recent activity. It will be closed in 14 days if no further activity occurs.
If we missed this issue please reply to keep it active.
Thanks for being a part of the Nx community! 🙏

[github-actions]

This issue has been closed for more than 30 days. If this issue is still occuring, please open a new issue with more recent context.