Missing dist/module.esm.min.js in 3.15.11

[metametadata]

Alpine.js version

v3.15.11

Description

I use the ES module version of the library and the minified version is absent in the latest release v3.15.11.

import Alpine from '../node_modules/alpinejs/dist/module.esm.min.js';

window.$selectedFiles = Alpine.reactive([]);
Alpine.start();

...

Steps

Get the release 3.15.11 from NPM.

Actual

dist/module.esm.min.js is absent:

~/Desktop/alpinejs-3.15.11/dist ᐅ tree
.
├── cdn.js
├── cdn.min.js
├── module.cjs.js
└── module.esm.js

1 directory, 4 files

Expected

dist/module.esm.min.js is present.

[joshhanley]

Hey @metametadata, thanks for the report! There's a different issue hidden in this one.

dist/module.esm.min.js has never actually been produced by our build script. If you check scripts/build.js, the module.js branch only emits module.esm.js and module.cjs.js. Only the cdn.js branch emits a minified variant.

The file you've been importing was a stale artifact sitting in a maintainer's local dist/ folder, getting swept into each npm publish tarball because dist/ isn't cleaned before builds. I pulled the 3.14.9 and 3.15.10 tarballs from npm and the module.esm.min.js files are byte-for-byte identical, both with version:"3.13.10" baked in. In other words, this file hasn't actually been rebuilt since the 3.13.10 release, so anyone importing it has been running 3.13.10 code regardless of the version they installed.

3.15.11 was the first release cut by our new GitHub Actions release workflow, which runs from a clean checkout, so the stale file no longer rides along.

Before we decide what to do, could you share a bit more about your setup?

1. Are you using a bundler (Vite, webpack, Rollup, esbuild) or loading modules directly in the browser via import maps or <script type="module">?
2. Is there a reason you're importing from ../node_modules/alpinejs/dist/module.esm.min.js rather than the bare specifier alpinejs and minifying it yourself?

[metametadata]

Got it, thanks for the detailed explanation.

1. There's no bundler, node_modules are exposed to the Internet and the HTML page requires its JS file via <script src="/foo/bar.js" type="module"> which imports directly from node_modules:

   import Alpine from '../node_modules/alpinejs/dist/module.esm.min.js';
   import axios from '../node_modules/axios/dist/esm/axios.min.js';
   
   ...

2. The project is based on htmx with just some tiny bits of JS. We want to avoid complicating this setup with any extra tools and steps as much as possible.

[joshhanley]

@metametadata thanks for that. Yep makes sense. I've submitted a PR to add a minified ESM build.