barely-a-dev-server

barely-a-dev-server

A thin, opinionated wrapper for esbuild as a .ts web server. Given a entryRoot folder, it:

• finds all .ts file in entryRoot and uses them as entry files to run esbuild in watch mode, and
• serves the built .js files together with a fallback to entryRoot for static files.

When run with "dev": false, it writes these files to an output dir (dist/ + the source root by default), ready to serve using your favorite static file server.

Usage:

// script/build.js
import { barelyServe } from "barely-a-dev-server";

barelyServe({
  entryRoot: "src/sites", // the only required arg
  dev: true,
  port: 3333,
  esbuildOptions: {
    target: "esnext",
  },
});

<!-- src/index.html -->
<script src="./index.js" href="./index.ts" type="module" defer></script>

(Note that src must reference the built .js file. You can use href to store a reference to the source that e.g. you can click in VSCode.)

// index.ts
const a: number = 4;
console.log(a);

Assumptions

• You're using only ESM code.
• You have a build script to invoke this from. (TODO: CLI)