userscript-composer

Ability to compose userscripts for unified distribution.

Table of Contents

- userscript-composer
- Overview
- Quickstart
- Workaround
- Usage
- Commands
- userscript-composer init
- userscript-composer build
- userscript-composer batch
- userscript-composer unify
- API
- Development

---

Overview

Elegant userscript build tool with:
- ✨ TypeScript support
- 💫 JSX support
- 🔗 Bundling with dependencies
- 📋 Composing scripts
- 🙃 Standalone bundling

userscript-composer is built top on cac, esbuild, picomatch, and terser to give you best development experience and production output.
Thanks to authors and contributors of those packages as userscript-composer could not exists without their technologies.

Quickstart

To install quick as possible, you can use following commands to initiate building.

``sh
mkdir userscript-composer-playground
cd userscript-composer-playground

mkdir scripts
touch header.txt # header.txt will be prepended to unified output

npm init -y
npm install -g userscript-composer

Or you may use GitHub for latest versions which might have bug fixes for NPM versions


npm install -g git+https://github.com/seia-soto/userscript-composer.git
`

The script above will install userscript-composer as global package.
If you don't want to install package as global, you can remove -g flag from the command and add following entry to script in package.json.

`json
{
"scripts": {
"composer": "userscript-composer"
}
}
`

Now, bomb!

`sh
npm run composer -h
`

Workaround

The reason of userscript-composer to exist is automating the build process of multiple userscripts into one userscript.
To reach the goal, I decided to use transpilers and bundlers to build userscripts, and this made userscript-composer able to compile TypeScript, JSX files, and userscripts including dependencies.

Sure, we need some refactoring to enhance developer experience of userscript-composer project but here is the brief summary of the process.

1. cac process cli part
2. esbuild bundles and transforms userscripts
3. picomatch recognizes glob patterns and exports to regular expression
4. terser compresses the output

It's the basic thought I did first time to build this application.
I think this would be helpful if you want to contribute.

Then go to development section to continue.

Usage

Commands

Before getting started, let's create some folders and files for userscript-composer to work with.
Every options are changable, so don't worry.

- /scripts; directory userscripts located
- /out; directory output located
- /header.txt; file prepended to unified userscript

Also, there are some terms used in this project:

- Unified userscript, merged userscript including all subsequent userscripts under /scripts folder.
- Standalone userscript, the standalone version of each userscripts under /scripts folder. (Or the term bundled maybe familiar to you)

Trivials

- Nothing now.

Shared options

The options below are shared in all commands.

`
Options:
--source [directory] Set source directory to build (default: scripts)
--out [directory] Set output directory for build (default: dist)
--minify Minify the output for production use (default: false)
--clean Clean the build directory before build (default: false)
-v, --version Display version number
-h, --help Display this message
`

$3

Create new userscript-composer workspace with header.txt template, config.json file, and script directory.
This command runs userscript-composer build automatically after setting up.

If you give some arguments for build command, it will automatically apply it.

`bash
userscript-composer init [--source [directory]] [--out [directory]] [--minify] [--clean]
`

$3

Generate standalone userscript from source file.

- Define source file via --source [file].
- Define out file via --out [file].

`bash
userscript-composer build [--source [file]] [--out [file]] [--minify] [--clean]
`

$3

Batch build userscripts from source directory and save bundled userscripts to output directory.
Generate standalone userscripts from source directory files including .user..

`bash
userscript-composer batch [--source [directory]] [--out [directory]] [--minify] [--clean]
`

$3

Generate unified userscript bundling all userscripts from source directory.

- Define header file location via --header [filename].
- Define the output file name via --name [name].

`bash
userscript-composer unify [--source [directory]] [--out [directory]] [--name [name]] [--header [headerfile]] [--minify] [--clean]
`

API

We provide the JavaScript API to build from Node.JS application via ES Module format.
Read more about ES Module by Lin Clark.

By seeing the /src/index.ts, you can see what things are being exported via module.
Also, every functions necessary required to implement the build action has comment.

Development

To make our development environment to be flatten, here are the list of necessary softwares we should use.
As you know, the editor is not important and you may use any of released or your own.

- Node.JS LTS Gallium (v16) as JavaScript Runtime
- PNPM as Package Manager
- All version manager supporting .nvmrc`

That's all.

> WIP