Webpack error when attemping to use custom build

[edwardhorsford]

Description

I'm just adding exifreader to a personal project. I'm testing doing a custom build to see if it improves the speed of reading data (feel free to tell me it doesn't!).

I've added the below to my package.json:

"exifreader": {
    "include": {
      "jpg": true,
      "png": true,
      "tiff": true,
      "heic": true,
      "webp": true,
      "gif": true,
      "file": true,
      "png_file": true,
      "exif": [
        "Model",
        "Lens",
        "LensModel",
        "ExposureTime",
        "FNumber",
        "FocalLengthIn35mmFilm",
        "ISOSpeedRatings",
        "DateTimeOriginal",
        "CreateDate",
        "ModifyDate",
        "By-line",
        "Copyright Notice",
        "Rating",
        "GPSDateStamp",
        "GPSTimeStamp",
        "GPSAltitude",
        "Image Width",
        "ImageWidth",
        "Image Height",
        "ImageHeight"
      ]
    }
  },

When I run npm install exifreader I get the following error:

npm ERR! command failed
npm ERR! command sh -c node bin/build.js --only-with-config
npm ERR! CLI for webpack must be installed.
npm ERR!   webpack-cli (https://github.com/webpack/webpack-cli)
npm ERR!
npm ERR! We will use "npm" to install the CLI via "npm install -D webpack-cli".
npm ERR! Do you want to install 'webpack-cli' (yes/no): node:child_process:960
npm ERR!     throw err;
npm ERR!     ^
npm ERR!
npm ERR! Error: Command failed: npx [email protected]

I've also tried installing the webpack-cli as per the error and that had no effect.

Additional details

• ExifReader version: latest
• Web browser and version:
• Node version: 20

What I expected would happen:

Expect npm install to succeed. It works fine if I remove the custom stuff from my package.json.

What really happened:

NPM install fails.

[mattiasw]

Hi! I will try to reproduce this. Do you happen to have webpack installed globally on your system? When looking around it sounded like that could be one reason for the error.

[mattiasw]

Oh, and a custom build should improve speed a little but it's probably only going to show for images that have a lot of the other types of metadata that it would skip with the custom build (XMP, ICC, etc.).

[edwardhorsford]

I don't believe I have webpack. But as noted, I did try adding it as a project dependancy and that didn't seem to help.

RE speed: I was previously using exif-parser which was quite a bit faster. But it's not a big problem - I was previously running on each build, but am now going to be pre-rendering data and saving it to file.

[mattiasw]

Sorry for not prioritizing this sooner. It has been hard to reproduce. Still couldn't do it but if you are still interested in a solution to this I have a PR that at least should not complain about a missing webpack-cli: #380

All my tests pass and it should be more robust in general so I will probably merge it either way.

[mattiasw]

Released as 4.23.4. Please re-open this issue if you're still having problems.

[edwardhorsford]

Thanks for looking at this @mattiasw! I've not worked on my site for a bit now, but when I next get back to it I'll update this.