Unbuild

Goals:

• Write code to work in the Browser first.
• No build step, no toolchain.
• This code also works in NodeJS.
• Optionally, then unbuild the single well-organized browser file into a bunch of sub-files that are NodeJS require dependent on each other.

This works well with other tools because of the browser field in package.json:

https://github.com/amark/gun/blob/master/package.json#L6

Basically, for other popular projects webpack/etc. would "build" a file but then people had problems with webpack wanting to build the built file.

So all systems adopted a skip/check that you could specify what that built bundle for the browser is in your package.json - in my case, that is my main/original gun.js file.

Slowly over time, these tools have started ignoring this and started regexp (and later, more complicated) for require and module.exports.

Initially we got around this by aliasing var USE = require and in some sad circumstances hiding module.export in some weird ( ?forget what?) if(typeof __webpack__module__exports__ !== 'undefined check.

Now the tools seem to be evaluating the code (? or regexp-ing for variables versus strings passed to require, thus the stupid 'request as dependency').

As-of-current (tho I might have to change this again), here is roughly what my system looks like:

;(function(){ // create a protective closure that variables can't escape from
  // unbuild setup ...
  function USE(path, force){ // wrapper that works in both browser & nodeJS
    return force? require(path) : ...
  }
  // ... end unbuild setup

  ;USE(function(module){
   // this would be its own NodeJS module file!
   module.exports = 42;
  })(USE, './path');

  ;USE(function(module){
   var path = USE('path'); // works in browser, and during NodeJS unbuild `USE` gets find&replaced with `require`
   module.exports = path + 2;
  })(USE, './add');

}());

And so on.

One last detail is, if you run the file as-is in NodeJS, you have to deal with the "master" module.export (not the per-USE polyfill), I've done this by successfully by defining a common = module in the outer scope during unbuild setup. Then in my "main" module I common.export = foo which NodeJS correctly handles.

Post Unbuild Process

Using unbuild on prebuild-source is simple, But using the unbuild-source after may has some catches.

The Problem is in the ./lib folder. The source files in ./lib uses require("../gun") to load gun.. but this causes it to load prebuild-source

The Fix is to "over-write" the ./gun.js file after unbuild execution. with module.exports = require("./src/index"); doing this will loop back into the unbuild-source directory instead of using the prebuild-source file.

Auto Post Unbuild Process

The community provided a solution for doing the unbuild process during the npm install process.

npm install github:bmatusiak/gun-unbuild

By adding this module to the same package that installs gun, will run the unbuild process on npm install .

• this will also re-minify/uglify gun.js to gun.min.js
• does not currently "over-write" the ./gun.js file after unbuild execution.