esbuild

What is esbuild?

esbuild is a fast JavaScript bundler and minifier. It compiles TypeScript and JavaScript into a single file, minifies it, and can also handle CSS and image assets. It's designed for speed and efficiency, utilizing parallelism and native Go code to achieve its performance.

What are esbuild's main functionalities?

Bundling JavaScript

This code bundles 'app.js' and its dependencies into a single file 'out.js'.

require('esbuild').build({
  entryPoints: ['app.js'],
  bundle: true,
  outfile: 'out.js'
}).catch(() => process.exit(1))

Minifying JavaScript

This code minifies 'app.js' to reduce file size and improve load times.

require('esbuild').build({
  entryPoints: ['app.js'],
  minify: true,
  outfile: 'out.js'
}).catch(() => process.exit(1))

Transpiling TypeScript

This code compiles a TypeScript file 'app.ts' into JavaScript and bundles it into 'out.js'.

require('esbuild').build({
  entryPoints: ['app.ts'],
  bundle: true,
  outfile: 'out.js'
}).catch(() => process.exit(1))

Serving files for development

This code starts a local server to serve files from the 'public' directory and bundles 'app.js' into 'public/out.js'.

require('esbuild').serve({
  servedir: 'public',
  port: 8000
}, {
  entryPoints: ['app.js'],
  bundle: true,
  outfile: 'public/out.js'
}).then(server => {
  // Server started
})

Other packages similar to esbuild

webpack

Webpack is a powerful and widely-used module bundler. It offers a rich plugin ecosystem and a highly configurable build process. Compared to esbuild, webpack is more mature with more features but is generally slower due to its JavaScript-based architecture.

rollup

Rollup is another JavaScript module bundler that focuses on producing efficient bundles for modern module formats like ES modules. It's known for its tree-shaking capabilities. Rollup is typically faster than webpack but slower than esbuild.

parcel

Parcel is a web application bundler that offers zero configuration out-of-the-box. It's faster than webpack and rollup but generally not as fast as esbuild. Parcel has a simpler user experience but may not be as flexible for complex configurations.

terser

Terser is a JavaScript parser, mangler, and compressor toolkit for ES6+. It's often used for minifying JavaScript code. While esbuild also minifies code, terser is a dedicated tool for this purpose and can be used alongside other bundlers.

README

esbuild

This is a JavaScript bundler and minifier. See https://github.com/evanw/esbuild and the JavaScript API documentation for details.

Changelog

0.25.5

• Fix a regression with browser in package.json (#4187)

  The fix to #4144 in version 0.25.3 introduced a regression that caused browser overrides specified in package.json to fail to override relative path names that end in a trailing slash. That behavior change affected the axios@0.30.0 package. This regression has been fixed, and now has test coverage.

• Add support for certain keywords as TypeScript tuple labels (#4192)

  Previously esbuild could incorrectly fail to parse certain keywords as TypeScript tuple labels that are parsed by the official TypeScript compiler if they were followed by a ? modifier. These labels included function, import, infer, new, readonly, and typeof. With this release, these keywords will now be parsed correctly. Here's an example of some affected code:

  type Foo = [
    value: any,
    readonly?: boolean, // This is now parsed correctly
  ]
  

• Add CSS prefixes for the stretch sizing value (#4184)

  This release adds support for prefixing CSS declarations such as div { width: stretch }. That CSS is now transformed into this depending on what the --target= setting includes:

  div {
    width: -webkit-fill-available;
    width: -moz-available;
    width: stretch;
  }