changelog.md

• ✨ Features

  • Add three build profiles and infrastructure for their toml config - fitzgen, issue/153 issue/160 pull/440

    When originally conceived, wasm-pack was exclusively a packaging and publishing tool, which naively assumed that the crate author would simply run wasm-pack when they were ready to publish a wasm package. As a result, wasm-pack always ran cargo build in --release mode. Since then, wasm-pack has grown into an integrated build tool used at all stages of development, from idea conception to publishing, and as such has developed new needs.

    In previous releases, we've supported a flag called --debug which will run cargo build in dev mode, which trades faster compilation speed for a lack of optimizations. We've renamed this flag to --dev to match cargo and added an additional flag, representing a third, intermediary, build profile, called --profiling which is useful for investigating performance issues. You can see all three flags and their uses in the table below:

    Profile	Debug Assertions	Debug Info	Optimizations	Notes
    --dev	Yes	Yes	No	Useful for development and debugging.
    --profiling	No	Yes	Yes	Useful when profiling and investigating performance issues.
    --release	No	No	Yes	Useful for shipping to production.

    The meaning of these flags will evolve as the platform grows, and always be tied to the behavior of these flags in cargo. You can learn more about these in the cargo profile documentation.

    This PR also introduces a way to configure wasm-pack in your Cargo.toml file that we intend to use much more in the future. As a largely convention-based tool, wasm-pack will never require that you configure it manually, however, as our community and their projects mature alongside the tool, it became clear that allowing folks the ability to drop down and configure things was something we needed to do to meet their needs.

    Currently, you can only configure things related to the above-mentioned build profiles. To learn more, check out the documentation. It leverages the package.metadata.wasm-pack key in your Carol.toml, and looks like this:

    # Cargo.toml
    
    [package.metadata.wasm-pack.profile.dev.wasm-bindgen]
    # Should we enable wasm-bindgen's debug assertions in its generated JS glue?
    debug-js-glue = true
    # Should wasm-bindgen demangle the symbols in the "name" custom section?
    demangle-name-section = true
    # Should we emit the DWARF debug info custom sections?
    dwarf-debug-info = false

    As always- there are defaults for you to use, but if you love to configure (or have a project that requires it), get excited, as your options have grown now and will continue to!

  • DEPRECATION: Rename --debug to --dev to match cargo - fitzgen, pull/439

    See the discussion of the build profiles feature above. This is a strict renaming of the previous --debug flag, which will now warn as deprecated.

  • Pre-build before wasm-pack publish - csmoe, issue/438 pull/444

    Previously, if you ran wasm-pack publish before you had successfully run wasm-pack build, you'd receive an error that a package could not be found- because there would be no pkg or out-directory containing a package.json.

    In this situation, you would hope that wasm-pack would build your package for you when you ran wasm-pack publish. This is slightly complicated by the fact that not everyone wants to build their package to the default target or to a directory named pkg.

    To solve this, running wasm-pack publish before a successful build will give you an interactive prompt to build your package- allowing you to specify your out directory as well as the target you'd like to build to. Check it out in the gif below:

    

  • Generate self-.gitignore as part of pkg folder - RReverser, pull/453

    Since wasm-pack was first published, the pkg directory was intended to be treated as a build artifact, and as such should never be published to version control. This was never enforced by any assets generated by wasm-pack, however.

    Now, when building your package, wasm-pack will also generate a .gitignore file so that the pkg, or out-directory, will be ignored.

    If you use another version control tool, you'll need to still create or edit your own ignore file- pull requests to support other version control tools are welcome!

    If you require editing of the generated package.json or add additonal assets to your package before publishing, you'll want to remove the .gitignore file and commit to version control. We intend to have a solution that makes this workflow significantly easier in upcoming releases!

  • Support cargo workspaces - fitzgen, issue/252 issue/305 pull/430

    Workspaces are a well-liked and used feature of cargo that allow you to build multiple crates in a single cargo project. Because of how wasm-pack handled paths for target and out-directories, we did not support cargo workspaces out of the box. Now they should work well and the feature is well guarded by tests!

  • Use a global cache for all downloaded binaries - alexcrichton, pull/426

    wasm-pack is an integrated build tool that orchestrates several other command line tools to build your wasm project for you. How wasm-pack does this has evolved significantly since it's early versions. In the last version, a bin directory was created to house the tool binaries that wasm-pack needed to build our project, but this had several limitations. Firstly, it created a bin directory in your project's root, which could be confusing. Secondly, it meant that sharing these tools across multiple projects was not possible. We did this because it gaves us the fine-grained control over the version of these tools that you used.

    Now, wasm-pack will not generate a bin directory, but rather will use a global cache. We retain the fine-grained control over the versions of these tools that are used, but allow multiple projects that use the same tools at the same versions to share the already installed asset. Your global cache will generally be in your user's home directory- we use the dirs crate to determine where to place this global cache. This is not currently customizable but is something we intend to look into doing!

    This feature ensures that wasm-pack users are downloading a minimal number of binaries from the network, which, for wasm-pack users with multiple projects, should speed up build times.

• 🤕 Fixes

  • Fix pack, login, and publish for Windows users - danwilhelm, issue/277 pull/489

    Rust's behavior for spawning processes on some Windows targets introduced an interesting case where Rust would fail unless the command was explicitly spawned with a prepended cmd /c. This failure of wasm-pack was well noticed by our community - and thanks to the efforts of danwilhelm is now fixed! You can read more on the background of this issue in rust-lang/rust issue/44542.

  • Validate --target argument - csmoe, issue/483 pull/484

    For a few releases now, wasm-pack has supported allowing users to specifying the target module system they'd like their package built for- browser, nodejs, and no-modules. We did not however, validate this input, and so if a user made even a slight mistake, e.g. node, wasm-pack would not catch the error and would build your project using the default, browser. This is of course, surprising, and unpleasant behavior and so now we'll error out with a message containing the supported target names.

  • Fix login - danwilhelm, issue/486 pull/487

  • Eliminate unecessary escaping in build success terminal output - huangjj27, issue/390 pull/396

    Previously, on some systems, a successful wasm-pack build would print a unfortunate looking string:

    | :-) Your wasm pkg is ready to publish at "\\\\?\\C:\\Users\\Ferris\\tmp\\wasm-bug\\pkg".
    

    We've updated this to make sure the path to your project is well-formed, and most importantly, human-readable.

  • Copy license file(s) to out directory - mstallmo, issue/407 pull/411

    Since wasm-pack was first published, we've copied over your Cargo.toml license definition over to your package.json. However, we overlooked copying the actual LICENSE files over! Now we do!

  • Don't require cdylib crate-type for testing - alexcrichton, pull/442

    wasm-pack was unecssarily checking Cargo.toml for the cdylib crate type during calls to wasm-pack test. The cdylib output isn't necessary for the wasm-pack test stage because wasm-bindgen isn't being run over a wasm file during testing. This check is now removed!

  • Fix wasm-bindgen if lib is renamed via lib.name - alexcrichton, issue/339 pull/435

    In some circumstances, a library author may wish to specify a name in the [package] portion of their Cargo.toml, as well as a different name in the [lib] portion, e.g.:

    [package]
    name = "hello-wasm"
    
    [lib]
    name = "wasm-lib"

    This would cause the wasm-bindgen build stage of wasm-pack to error out because wasm-pack would attempt to run wasm-bindgen-cli on a path using the [package] name, which wouldn't exist (because it would be using the [lib] name). Now it works- thanks to more usage of cargo_metadata in wasm-pack internals!

  • Print standard error only once for failing commands - fitzgen, issue/422 pull/424

    Previously, wasm-pack may have printed stderr twice in some circumstances. This was both confusing and not a pleasant experience, so now we've ensued that wasm-pack prints stderr exactly once! (It's hard enough to have errors, you don't want wasm-pack rubbing it in, right?)

  • Add no-modules to --target flag's help text - fitzgen, issue/416 pull/417

    This is an interesting one! fitzgen very reasonably filed an issue asking to add wasm-bindgen's --target no-modules feature to wasm-pack. This was confusing as this feature was indeed already implemented, and documented- BUT, notably missing from the wasm-pack --help text. We've fixed that now- and it was an omission so glaring we definitely considered it a bug!

• 🛠️ Maintenance

  • Replace slog with log - alexcrichton, issue/425 pull/434

    For internal maintenance reasons, as well as several end-user ones, we've migrated away from the slog family of crates, and are now using the log crate plus env_logger. Now, wasm-pack won't create a wasm-pack.log. Additionally, enabling logging will now be done through RUST_LOG=wasm_pack instead of -v flags.

  • Move binary installation to its own crate - drager, issue/384 pull/415

    In wasm-pack 0.5.0, we move away from cargo installing many of the tools that wasm-pack orchestrates. Because we used cargo install, this required an end user to sit through the compilation of each tool, which was a prohibitively long time. We moved, instead, to building, and then installing, binaries of the tools. This sped up build times dramatically!

    This pattern has been very beneficial to wasm-pack and is potentially something that could be beneficial to other projects! As a result, we've refactored it out into a crate and will be considering publishing it in the near future!

  • Replace internal Error with failure::Error - alexcrichton, pull/436

    The story of error message handling in wasm-pack has not been the prettiest. We originally were manually implementing errors, adding the failure crate at one point, but not fully updating the entire codebase. With this PR, we are nearly completely handling errors with failure, bringing the code into a much more maintainable and pleasant-to-work-on place.

  • Update mdbook version used by Travis - fitzgen, pull/433

  • Read the Cargo.toml file only once - fitzgen, issue/25 pull/431

    This is a very fun one since it fixes one of the original issues filed by ag_dubs at the very beginning of wasm-pack development. In a rush to implement a POC tool, ag_dubs noted for posterity that the Cargo.toml was being read multiple times (twice), when it did not need to be. Thanks to fitzgen now it's read only once! A minor performance improvement in the scheme of things, but a nice one :)

  • Use name field for Travis CI jobs - fitzgen, pull/432

  • Add a test for build command - huangjj27, pull/408

  • Test paths on Windows - xmclark, issue/380 pull/389

  • Fix typo in test function name for copying the README - mstallmo, pull/412

• 📖 Documentation

  • Complete template deep dive docs - danwilhelm, issue/345 issue/346 pull/490

    In a rush to publish a release, ag_dubs left some "Coming soon!" comments on most pages of the "Template Deep Dive" docs. These docs help walk new users through the boilerplate that using the wasm-pack template generates for you. Thanks so much to danwilhem for picking this up and doing an excellent job!

  • Minor docs updates - fitzgen, issue/473 pull/485