@matter/tools

Matter.js Tooling

This package supports build, test and execution infrastructure for other matter.js packages.

This package supports all Node.js LTS versions starting with 18.x

Rational

Matter.js consists of a large number of generated TypeScript files. We support multiple module formats targeting disparate JavaScript runtimes including Node and web browsers. We publish a moderate (and growing) number of packages to NPM. We support Linux, Windows and MacOS.

Previously, TSC analysis and test times had become quite slow. A proliferation of configuration files for TSC and test framework was adding significant redundancy to the codebase.

This package standardizes and centralizes configuration for build and test. It minimizes reliance on TSC and generally does its best to run build and test as quickly as possible.

Dev workflow

Although Matter.js relies on third party tools for build and test, the interface is command-line oriented and unique to Matter.js. As such it will be unfamiliar to new developers.

To minimize developer burden, we also maintain traditional tsconfig.json files with project references in each src/ and test/. These files support traditional IDE and tsc --watch workflows and are largely (but not entirely) ignored by the tooling package.

These files do add configuration overhead but we minimize this with a shared tsconfig.base.json supplied by this package.

We also supply a standard .mocharc.cjs in packages with tests. You can use this with your IDE's Mocha integration for standard testing workflows.

Build

We use TSC to validate TypeScript types and generate declaration files. We use esbuild for transcoding TypeScript to ESM (ES6 module format) and CJS (CommonJS module format).

The matter-build script orchestrates TSC and esbuild. It inspects package.json for the target module to determine whether to emit ESM, CJS or both.

Use matter-build --help for command line usage. matter-build --workspaces builds all workspace packages that have changed (or depend on other workspace packages that have changed) since the last build.

matter-build itself is implemented in TypeScript. It uses esbuild to bootstrap itself in fresh installs.

Test

We run tests using Mocha with chai for assertions. For multi-format modules we run tests as both CJS and ESM. For packages that support browsers we run tests in a headless browser using Playwright.

The matter-test scripts orchestrates test execution. Use matter-test --help for command line usage.

By default matter-test inspects package.json for the target module to determine whether to test ESM, CJS or both under Node. Web tests do not run by default but you can enable them using the -w option.

matter-test supports environment variables of the form MATTER_<OPTION> for most command line arguments. This includes MATTER_SPEC, MATTER_PROFILE, MATTER_GREP, MATTER_FGREP, MATTER_INVERT and MATTER_ALL_LOGS.

Matter.js emits a significant volume of logging during testing. By default, matter-test captures these logs internally and only emits them when reporting on failed tests.

The test environment orchestrated by this package installs a small number of Mocks for Matter.js infrastructure singletons. global-declarations.ts defines a global API for these mocks.

Execution

The final command supplied by the tooling package is matter-run. This command bootstraps tooling, transpiles the target module, and executes the named JS or TS script.

matter-run understands Matter.js package.json conventions and automatically transpiles typescript files in the target package prior to execution.

matter-run accepts a script to run and passes other arguments to the script verbatim.

If you set the environment variable MATTER_ECHO, matter-run will print the command line prior to invoking a script.