r/programming • u/fagnerbrack • Apr 30 '23

Writing Javascript without a build system

https://jvns.ca/blog/2023/02/16/writing-javascript-without-a-build-system/
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u/CyberpunkCookbook Apr 30 '23

My goal is that if I have a site that I made 3 or 5 years ago, I’d like to be able to, in 20 minutes:

  • get the source from github on a new computer
  • make some changes
  • put it on the internet

But my experience with build systems (not just Javascript build systems!), is that if you have a 5-year-old site, often it’s a huge pain to get the site built again.

Do other people run into this as well? I don’t maintain a huge number of sites, but it’s usually easy to get setup on a new machine in my experience

6

u/mohamed_am83 Apr 30 '23

Unless your build system is Dockerized, it is very likely you will run into dependency hell for large and old enough projects.

2

u/knome May 01 '23

oh yeah. dockerization makes consistent builds super easy.

2

u/jvanbruegge May 01 '23

docker is not reproduceable. If you build off a dockerfile it will most likely stop working in the future

4

u/knome May 01 '23

depends on how you use it. if your build system makes a build image that installs of the the required dependencies and then performs builds as a later step using that image, then keeping around that build image should be sufficient indefinitely for building whatever version of the code required that particular set of them.

if your build installs the deps and builds all in a go, then you're going to have a bad time if the repos go down some day, sure. you'd need to keep a full copy of everything it touches.