Feature Request: auto detect and write dependencies

[daKmoR]

Description

Let's say I have these dependencies in my package which resides within a monorepo

  "dependencies": {
    "@rocket/cli": "^0.20.4",
    "@rocket/components": "^0.2.0",
    "@rocket/engine": "^0.2.7",
  },

now when I execute npm run ts it should run ts in all my "dependencies" (and its dependencies) first...
you can archive it via

  "scripts": {
    "ts": "wireit",
  },
  "wireit": {
    "ts": {
      "command": "tsc --build --pretty",
      "dependencies": [
        "../cli:ts",
        "../components:ts",
        "../engine:ts"
      ],
    }
  }

but it feels like duplicating the dependency tree...

  "dependencies": {
    "@rocket/cli": "^0.20.4",
    "@rocket/components": "^0.2.0",
    "@rocket/engine": "^0.2.7",
  },
  // and 
  "dependencies": [
    "../cli:ts",
    "../components:ts",
    "../engine:ts"
  ],

Don't get me wrong I like that it is very explicit to say what is depending on what... but can get quite hard to maintain as you always need not think of 2 kind of dependencies

Suggestion

Maybe we could introduce a "command" like wireit detect-dependencies.

What it could then do is

1. go through all dependencies and look if it has an npm command with the same name
2. if it has then add it to the wireit commands dependencies

Example

This is the starting point

  "dependencies": {
    "@rocket/cli": "^0.20.4",
    "@rocket/components": "^0.2.0",
    "@rocket/engine": "^0.2.7",
  },
  "scripts": {
    "ts": "wireit",
  },
  "wireit": {
    "ts": {
      "command": "tsc --build --pretty",
    }
  }

We execute wireit detect-dependencies and this is what we would get

  "dependencies": {
    "@rocket/cli": "^0.20.4",
    "@rocket/components": "^0.2.0",
    "@rocket/engine": "^0.2.7",
  },
  "scripts": {
    "ts": "wireit",
  },
  "wireit": {
    "ts": {
      "command": "tsc --build --pretty",
      "dependencies": [
        "../cli:ts",
        "../components:ts",
        "../engine:ts"
      ],
    }
  }

This would be sort of a "helper" script to sync dependencies... executing it and verifying would be a manual process.

Would probably be nice to also offer it as "linting"...
And as it's all just "helpers" it could also be "just" in the vs-code extension.

What do you think?

[aomarks]

Very interesting idea, thank you!

A related issue is #23, where I had suggested having a way to specify dependencies like this directly with a special syntax.

But I do quite like the idea of doing this, along with potentially other kinds of automatic configuration that updates the package.json, using a lint --fix style command, instead of baking automation directly into the standard execution.

[cefn]

I found myself following the proposed pattern in a recent experimental monorepo.

I authored routines that either validate or fix the wireit structures in package.json across multiple packages, with logic that reads their dependencies.

These link to a commit from work-in-progress but they show the pattern...

https://github.com/cefn/watchable/blob/55736dd28a8d5030c033926e3bfb9ab6ba1e8c36/tooling/validate/ruleConfig.ts#L41-L79

https://github.com/cefn/watchable/blob/55736dd28a8d5030c033926e3bfb9ab6ba1e8c36/package.json#L19-L20