🦕 Support Deno and release on NPM with a single codebase.🦕

What it is

A build tool that takes as input a TypeScript codebase that was meant to target node and/or the web and spits out a modified version of the source files ready to be deployed as a Deno module.

what_denoify_does

NOTE: Denoify won’t run on Deno, it is a Node module.

If you are just looking for a quick way to load NPM modules in your Deno project you can check out CommonJS module Loading, unlike Denoify, it won’t give you types definitions, it will involve node_modules/ and require --allow-read but it will also be easier to get working. Some NPM modules can also be imported into Deno using CDN like Skypack (ex Pika) or jspm checkout Soremwar/deno_types for some examples.

This tool is mainly for NPM module maintainer, to enable them to bring first-class citizen Deno support to their modules and do so without introducing breaking changes.

Motivations

Although it is quite easy to port a module to Deno no one wants to maintain two codebase.
Wouldn’t it be great to have a tool able to bring Deno support to NPM modules?

Example of modules using Denoify

Modules that have been made cross-runtime using Denoify:

Introduction video

NOTE: New features have been introduced since this meeting was hold

Limitations

Coming up next is a detailed guide on how to set up denoify with your project and how to publish on deno.land/x but before anything here are the current limitations you need to be aware of.

If your module is vanilla JS it needs to be ported to TypeScript first. (1)
Not all Node’s builtin modules are supported yet. (2) But thanks to the new mechanism, à la React Native, that let you have specific deno implementation for some of your files, the lack of support for "https" or "net", while being annoying, is no longer a dead end.
If your module has dependencies you will have to enable those dependencies to run on Deno. While well documented, be aware that it is a time consuming process.
require() is not yet supported.
You can’t (yet) fs.readFile() files that are part of the module ( files inside a res/ directory for example ). (4)

(1) Don’t be afraid, renaming your source with .ts and dropping some any here and there will do the trick. You will be able to pull it off even if you aren’t familiar with typescript. Ref

(2) You can consult here the current state of the Node’s builtin support.

(4) In Deno the files that forms your module won’t be pre-fetched and placed in node_module like in node so you won’t be able to access files that are not on the disk.

Step by step tutorial

Check out this repo to see in practice how to set up Denoify in your project.

GitHub Actions setup

denoify_ci

Once you’ll have successfully build your module for Deno you will want to publish it on deno.land/x to do that in a clean way, without tracking the deno_dist/ on your main branch you’ll need to setup a CI workflow.
To do that you can use the .github/workflow/ci.yaml from tsafe, you can copy paste it, it’s portable.

When registering your module on deno.land/x you will need to specify the subdirectory:

deno_registration

Deal with `GitHub API rate limit exceeded`

If you run Denoify a lot outside of GitHub Actions pipelines you will eventually get the following error:
RequestError [HttpError]: API rate limit exceeded for 176.170.197.165. (But here's the good news: Authenticated requests get a higher rate limit. Check out the documentation for more details.). To fix it, create a GitHub Personal Access Token and provide it as the environnement variable GITHUB_TOKEN when you run the build tool.

Example:

echo ghp_xn8jsxZrUChs9nmfZPDSmxLrTJPVJy3Sxc5J > ~/.bash_profile
source ~/.bash_profile
npx denoify

What’s new

NEW IN v0.10

Mitigate the risk of comment being accidentally modified.
Possibility to specify output directory in the package.json’s denoify field. See doc.
Support module augmentation: declare module .... Example

NEW IN v0.9

tsconfig.json can be absent if outputDir is specified. See @zxch3n’s PR
Enable to configure the name of the output dir. It no longer has to be deno_dist. See @zxch3n’s PR

NEW IN v0.7

Support for esm modules. See issue. Thanks to yandeu.