proof-of-concept asset installer

Please note that future work on this will happen at npm/npm#npm-asset, if you'd like to discuss it please drop by the #npm channel on the https://package.community Discord.

A CLI that extracts ESM into assets/ and transforms their import statements from module names to paths in the asset folder.

$ assetize name-of-module
1 module installed.

To see the source for the example modules, check out demo/1 and demo/2. To try it out, run npm start (which just runs tryme.sh)

Then checkout http://localhost:5000/demo.html or browse around in assets/ to see how things were transformed.

Loading an asset looks like:

<script type="module">
  import moduleName from './assets/module-name.js'
</script>

or

<script type="module" src="./assets/module-name.js"></script>

Which isn't super pretty, but if you only have to do it once it's not so bad. Imports from inside assets are translated from node-style to browser style, including .mjs → .js. Check out the source to the modules here:

• @iarna/demo-esm-1
• @iarna/demo-esm-2

Contrast with the version found in ./assets.

Oh, and to show that these are still usable from node, the two demo modules are dev deps of this project. Try:

node --experimental-modules demo.mjs

import demo from '@iarna/demo-esm-2'
console.log('IMPORTED')
console.log(demo())

proof-of-concept

This is a proof of concept. It uses probably fragile regexps to do replacement.

stuff remaining to be proofed

1. assetDependencies package.json section
2. saving assets to package-lock or asset-lock
3. handling version conflicts in entirely flat trees