esy-npm-project-example

The simplest esy project, installable with the npm CLI.

This project has nothing to do with Reason, and nothing to do with ocaml. The only purpose is to demonstrate that esy can be used with pure NPM packages.

Try:

git clone [email protected]:reasonml/esy-npm-project-example.git
cd esy-npm-project-example
npm install

Verify that esy ran its build

ls _install

This project merely demonstrates using esy to perform the simplest possible "native build/compile". Native compilation "installs" a subset of artifacts into a final destination, and this project demonstrates doing that.

As a result of using esy, this tiny project benefits from everything that esy provides (caching, parallelism).

What's going on:

The package.json is very easy to understand. As always, esy looks for the "esy" section and runs the build / install commands listed.

esy is not, and never will be, a build system - it merely is the glue to call into your build system, and provides you critical information to forward to your build scripts that make caching/reliability work. In this case, cur__bin is the standard esy location where you install binary artifacts. This makes sure that these artifacts will be seen by packages that depend on you in their build scripts.

{
  "name": "esy-npm-project-example",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "Simple example of using esy on pure npm cli.",
  "scripts": {
    "install": "esybuild"
  },
  "esy": {
    "build": ["make install DESTINATION=$cur__bin"]
  },
  "dependencies": {
    "test": "file:../test",
    "esy": "https://github.com/reasonml/esy.git#beta-v-bleeding"
  }
}

Typical use case:

More typically, you won't even acknowledge cur__bin. Instead you would use a utility like ocamlfind or opam-installer to install packages and that already knows where cur__bin is and so you won't have to talk about cur__bin. This simple example just shows what's avaiable under the hood so that you can integrate your own ocamlfind or equivalent.