broccoli-module-alchemist-install

Broccoli Module Alchemist Install

This package contains a small script that can be used in tandem with broccoli-module-alchemist to write Node packages in ES6+ but maintain backwards compatibility with Node 0.12 and before.

How It Works

Configure your package to use broccoli-module-alchemist. In particular, you'll want to make sure that a CommonJS version of your app is being built into dist/cjs (the default behavior).

Once that's done, add a post-install script to your package's package.json. The script will try to load the source from src/; if it's unable to, it will fallback to using the transpiled CommonJS version in dist/cjs.

This allows you to take advantage of new syntax features like () => arrow functions and destructuring in Node v4+, but detecting failures in Node 0.12 and before and falling back to the transpiled version.

Configuration

# make sure to save as a dependency, not a devDependency,
# so it's available when people npm install your package
npm install broccoli-module-alchemist-install --save

// package.json
"scripts": {
  "postinstall": "broccoli-module-alchemist-install"
}

After your package is installed, this script will rewrite the package.json's main field to point to dist/cjs if it was not able to require() your package's default main.

You MUST explicitly set an entry point into your package's src/ directory via package.json's main field. Without that set, this workflow doesn't work.

Advantages

This approach treats the src/ directory as canonical and avoids transpilation, so while you are developing your package you don't need to add an error-prone build step before running tests, etc.

Only for backwards-compatibility do you need to deal with transpilation, so you maintain development speed and the productivity gains of ES2015 and move transpilation cost to distribution time.

License

MIT