Meteor 1.3 - NPM packages in Atmosphere packages

[clayne]

Continuing the discussion from Meteor 1.3 early beta now available:

Meteor 1.3 *early beta* now available

I’d like to reiterate a question that was asked earlier - how will this work with importing the same NPM package in multiple Meteor packages? Will the dependency tree be managed to ensure only one copy of each library is included?

Meteor 1.3 *early beta* now available

@clayne Great question, and thanks for reiterating it. My current plan (slightly different from what’s implemented in the latest beta release) is that the top-level node_modules/ directory in an app will provide importable packages not only for application code but also for Meteor packages. In other words, the app gets to decide which version of an npm package will be used throughout the app and its packages. Packages can still use Npm.depends to install their own local dependencies, but they can also import or require npm dependencies that they did not explicitly install, with the expectation that the application will provide those dependencies.

So, to answer your question: no, the dependency tree will not be managed by Meteor, and there will be no special enforcement of single installation, but it should be straightforward for the app to provide a single version of a common dependency.

Meteor 1.3 *early beta* now available

This will work alright in the case of a package that I write myself, but what about if I want to release a package on Atmosphere?

Will there be a way to tell the compiler that a certain package is required as a top-level NPM package, or to have something like a weak Npm.depends such that if the if the NPM package is included at the top level, it doesn’t get included, otherwise it does?

The first thing that comes to my mind is allowing a Meteor package to essentially declare a top-level NPM dependency, forcing the application owner to import NPM packages. That moves us closer to a full-NPM ecosystem that is less reliant on Atmosphere, which I think is a good thing as that seems to be the way things are generally moving.

Thoughts?

@benjamn

[markoshust]

This seems like a good solution – sort of a ‘required npm’ package. I think it would be neat if the meteor command can append requested npm packages to package.json, then automatically run npm install afterwards. It would tell the user what packages were installed (sort of like how meteor packages are installed now), then execute the regular meteor run command afterwards.

[bysabi]

I open a similar issue on meteor: https://github.com/meteor/meteor/issues/5890#issuecomment-171871130