Developing and Building multiple projects

[pvande]

Snowpack has a --config flag, so you could run snowpack build --config [app A]/snowpack.config.js && snowpack build --config [appB]/snowpack.config.js to build multiple apps for production at once.

You could also use the concurrently package along with the --config and --watch flags to watch 2 apps simultaneously (or more!).

(From #1116)

At first glance, this seems like a great plan: concurrently looks like a fantastic tool, and this is a clean and simple way to separate distinct Javascript builds within a project. Unfortunately, for an application with a (hypothetical) structure like this:

/app
- /bundle-a
  - /shared -> /app/shared
- /bundle-b
  - /shared -> /app/shared
- ...
- /shared

… running a separate build or dev instance for each bundle will rebuild files from /app/shared n times, and using --hmr will require binding to n different ports (which also implies needing to map bundles to ports in the application, expose ports via Docker, etc.).

If the bundles all shared the same JS and CSS processing configuration, this would be easily managed by simply mounting each bundle. It's trivial to make dynamic using Node's glob package, and everything runs in a single process (aside: and only builds shared content once?). If they do not share the same configuration (in my case, it would be impractical to impose that requirement), we lose out on those benefits.