Julien Richard-Foy
This week we release the first version of scalajs-bundler, a tool that makes it easier to use npm packages for Scala.js developers. This effort is part of the Scala Center’s initiative to ensure the continuity of the Scala.js project.
Vision
Our goal is to make npm dependencies management as easy as JVM dependencies management.
Basically, if your application needs to use an npm package foo, all you have to do is to
add to your build a line like the following:
npmDependencies in Compile += "foo" -> "1.0"
And then the usual run and test sbt commands just work.
Challenge
npm is the most popular JavaScript package registry. How can Scala.js applications benefit from the many libraries published on npm? First, this requires to resolve and download these libraries including their transitive dependencies. Then, the artifacts need to be linked with the Scala.js code. This last step is subtler than it seems because the linking process varies according to the target execution environment. For instance, Node.js expects artifacts to conform to the CommonJS format, whereas this format is not compatible with the execution from a web browser. Furthermore, in the case of web development, when the application is shipped to production it is better to pack all the code and its dependencies into a single bundle whose format is executable by web browsers.
Existing solutions
There are mainly two existing approaches to tackle these challenges: using WebJars or combining two build systems (one for the Scala world and one for the npm world). Both of them require extra efforts from developers or have limitations (you can find more details about that in scalajs-bundler’s documentation).
Current state
scalajs-bundler leverages the CommonJS modules support brought by the latest Scala.js release.
The 0.1 release contains an sbt plugin that:
- lets developers define their npm dependencies (as in the introductory example),
- keeps track of transitive npm dependencies between Scala.js artifacts,
- fetches these dependencies from the npm registry,
- provides tasks to bundle the application into a single artifact executable by web browsers.
The plugin uses npm and webpack under the hood.
We also provide a second sbt plugin that integrates with sbt-web-scalajs: it basically turns bundles into sbt-web assets.
Future work
There is still some work to do (in particular to shorten the duration of the bundling process in the context of live reloading workflows) and we expect to release a 0.2 version soon, but this first release is already usable, so don’t hesitate to give it a try, we’d love to get your feedback!