What is packagebind?

Lets say you have built an utility package and published on npm and in your application you are using that utility package. Now some change is required in the utility package. Would you cut a new release just to try if it works in application? Nah.

"I'll use npm link" you might be thinking but it has mulitple known issues.

And so we built packagebind.

How does it work?

There is an awesome babel plugin called module-resolver which lets you change the path of imports in your source-code.

Its used in babel.config.js like this

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    ["module-resolver", {
      alias: {
        "my-design-kit": "../my-design-kit/src", // local path to package source files,
      }
    }]
  ]
}

This in itself is good enough, HMR works but there is a problem. The my-design-kit package would probably have its own babel config and its own set of node_modules dependencies. Right now instead of using those things, the package is going to use the application's babel config and node_modules.

This is how we solve it.

Inside babel.config.js

const packagebind = require('packagebind');

const babelConfig = {
  plugins: [
    ["module-resolver", {
      alias: {
        "my-design-kit": "../my-design-kit/src", // local path to package source files
      }
    }]
  ]
}

module.exports = packagebind(babelConfig);

Dependency

• babel-plugin-module-resolver (For providing alias)
• babel7 (Aliasing doesn't work correctly with babel6)