Modernize djblets JavaScript setup.
Review Request #14646 — Created Oct. 23, 2025 and updated — Latest diff uploaded
This change makes a bunch of changes to modernize our JavaScript build
process across our products:Support npm workspaces
In order to better support development across our many repos and
packages, this dramatically improves the way we handle npm workspaces.We used to have a djblets/package.json file which defines our JavaScript
dependencies, and then a symbolic link from the repo root to make that
also available fornpm install. This change removes the symbolic link,
and adds a new top-levelpackage.jsonwhich defines workspaces as
djbletsand.npm-workspaces/*. This allows creating symbolic links
in the workspaces directory in order to bring in development copies of
spina, ink, beanbag-eslint-plugin, or whatever other JS dependencies one
desires.Depending on the package, this may require having a shared parent
directory and a symbolic link from ../node_modules to ./node_modules,
since some things like to resolve to absolute paths and then crawl up
the directory tree (looking at you,tsc).Update and consolidate JS dependencies.
The actual dependencies listed in djblets/package.json have been
simplified, using the new@beanbag/js-buildkitmetapackage to ensure
build-time dependencies. We also no longer have an explicit dependency
on spina and backbone versions, preferring instead to just inherit
whichever versions we're getting from ink.Remove
npm_dependenciesandbuild-npm-deps.pyIt used to be that all our JS dependencies were specified inside
djblets/dependencies.pyand then we would write out apackage.json
file on demand. A while back we inverted that so thatpackage.jsonwas
the authoritative list, and we would auto-generate python code back into
dependencies.py. However, none of that stuff was actually consumed
anywhere other than from within Review Board (which does the same
thing).I've removed the
build-npm-deps.pyscript and the associated block
insidedjblets/dependencies.py.Use modern invocation for static media builder utilities.
We were hard-coding the locations for
babel,lessc,rollup, and
uglifyjsbased onnode_modules/.bin. Because of the vagaries of npm
we can't necessarily assume that there's anode_modulesin the current
directory, or that things will be in.bin. I've changed these to use
npm exec ...instead, allowing npm to locate the binary and invoke it.Use terser instead of uglifyjs.
UglifyJS lacks support for a lot of ES6+ features, and its cousin
UglifyES is unmaintained. I've changed our pipeline configuration to use
Terser instead, which is a fork of these which is actively maintained
and supports newer JS. The actual dependency for this will live in
@beanbag/frontend-buildkit.Some of our upstream dependencies already depend on terser, so this
reduces our dependency footprint as well.I was hoping we would be able to get sourcemaps for the fully-compressed
JS with this, but unfortunately the way that django-pipeline does
compressors won't allow for that.Use modern pipeline setup for static media during tests.
Unit tests had their own pipeline configuration for some reason, which
didn't even include any of the rollup files. This has been replaced with
a call to the samebuild_pipeline_settingsthat we use everywhere
else.Pulled in backbone types.
I'm working on upstreaming our changes and improvements to the type
definitions for Backbone, but in the meantime we can't just reference
the file from node_modules the way we did before. This has been copied
into the djblets tree for the time being.Updated to ESLint 9.
With the newer
@beanbag/eslint-pluginbundled in
@beanbag/js-buildkit, we now use ESLint 9.
- Set up djblets into an environment that used npm workspaces to include
 djblets, reviewboard, @beanbag/frontend-buildkit, @beanbag/js-buildkit,
 @beanbag/jasmine-suites, and @beanbag/eslint-plugin.
- Ran unit tests.
- Ran eslint.
- Built static media.
- Built the rbintegrations extension to verify that static media
 building still worked for that.
