Comment by KronisLV
16 hours ago
Silly drive by take:
> I've worked with many frontend developers who seemed to believe listing dependencies in package.json in devDependencies instead of 'dependencies' controls what ends up in the production bundle.
If so many believe that it’s how it should work, maybe it just should work that way. Principle of least surprise and all that.
You can and probably should set up your production builds that way but it's not automatic.
It also gets messy if you're building 2 or 3 services simultaneously out of the same node_modules dir. E.g frontend, backend, shared, scripts...
How would you set that up?
Like say you installed only the production dependencies, then you'd be missing the build tools, bundler, etc.
One idea would be to use hooks of your bundler to enforce that each module resolved during the production build is declared in the regular dependencies.
It would be far from a standard solution though.
https://github.com/import-js/eslint-plugin-import/blob/HEAD/...
It's not built in to ESLint, but it's fairly widely used in my experience and helps ensure that you've got a sensible split between production and non-production.
NX Monorepos work that way. Broadly speaking (and with many exceptions) all packages end up in the root. It “builds” release distributions with the correct package.json files and transpiled js.
It helps keep all your related packages on the same dependencies. It’s hell for react native sometimes though.
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