Why do bs-dependencies have to be in node_modules?

1

Hey all,

I’ve been trying to set up a ReScript project inside a monorepo powered by nx.dev.

I tried setting up a bsconfig.json

{
  "sources": [],
  "bs-dependencies": ["./libs/feature1"]
}

And then another bsconfig.json in the ./libs/feature1 directory

{
  name: "@app/feature1",
  sources: [{dir: "src", subdirs: true}, {dir: "test", subdirs: true, type: "dev"}]
}

This did not work as intended

File "bsconfig.json", line 1
Error: package ./libs/feature1 not found or built 
- Did you install it?
- If you did, did you run `rescript build -with-deps`?

So I thought to myself. What if I’m a bit cheeky and use a .. in the bs-dependencies. So I changed it to ../libs/feature1

This got me a bit further

File "/Users/user/path/to/repo/node_modules/../libs/feature1/bsconfig.json", line 2:
Error: package name is expected to be ../libs/feature1 but got @app/feature1

With this context I want to ask why bs-dependencies have to be in node_modules? Is it possible to change the system such that bs-dependencies take a Map instead of a list?

for this use case I could create something like:

{
  "bs-dependencies": {
    "@app/feature1": "./libs/feature1"
  }
}

This would be a ReScript analog to the tsconfig.json paths property

1 Like
2

I had a similar problem with my library that isn’t ready to publish on NPM yet but I wanted to test it in an app that I am building. My workaround was to create a softlink of the dependency folder inside node_modules, which worked fine.

However, I’d prefer something like your proposal, maybe as an alternative syntax with explicit paths.

3

How did you end up solving this?

4

By the way, you can npm install dependencies directly from github repos without publishing them

5

Also can install local npm dependencies

6

it works with turborepo

7

FWIW I ended up having a single bsconfig.json in my repository. The compilation is fast enough that the entire repo compiles in less than a second and I bundle my code anyway so the fact that my bs.js files are using relative paths across projects in the repo doesn’t really matter all that much.

1 Like