Browserify - How to include non-public purchased third party scripts

Question

I am new to browserify and its usage is not completely clear to me although the benefits seem to be compelling.

I have a couple of questions and was hoping someone could clarify.

1. I've seen blog posts about using browserify-shim in the package.json to include third party libraries like jquery and bootstrap. I've also seen posts where tools like gulp are used generate the bundle file. I can't seem to find a good answer on why browserify-shim is required if tools like gulp are able to automate the process. Can someone please shed some light? Why is browserify-shim even required? I feel the gulp solution is a little cleaner although a little more involved. It won't pollute package.json with browserify specific stuff that is a build thing and therefore goes together with gulp (just my personal opinion)

2. How does one deal with third party libraries that are not in npm and also not public? For example, we purchase a script from a third party. That script is not any common js, but is a regular js file with some dependencies (example, on jquery and underscore).

Answer 1

Browserify lets you take the world of Node and bundle it up for delivery to a browser. It understands Node modules, which define dependencies via CommonJS require statements.

But what if you have some JS code or library that is not defined as a Node module and does not support CommonJS? Enter browserify-shim. It provides a shim wrapper around any script, like your private third party script, so that it can be defined as and used as a Node module that Browserify understands.

The use of browserify-shim is completely orthogonal to how you execute Browserify. There are basically two options there: A) Use Browserify's command line API or B) Use Browserify's JS API.

Using a build tool, like Gulp, implies the second option, since you'd use Browserify's JS API in your Gulp build script (i.e. gulpfile.js). A lot of people prefer the use of Gulp because it has a good ecosystem of plugins that allow you to do a lot more than just call Browserify (e.g. compile CoffeeScript, compile SASS, run JSHint, etc).

So, to answer your specific questions:

1. Browserify-shim is only required if you have JS code that is not written as a Node/CommonJS module that you need to bundle via Browserify. To do so, you will need to tell browserify-shim which files to shim as modules (and what dependencies they have) in package.json. Note that this is totally unrelated to Gulp; so you will need it whether you use Gulp or not.

2. What you describe is the perfect use-case of browserify-shim. Put your third party script(s) in your project, configure the files to be modules in package.json per b-shim's documentation, require them in your code, and execute Browserify to bundle them up with your code. You could also bundle them up separately, put them in their own project, etc - however you want to structure it.

A couple things to note:

• You can shim just about any JS library this way.
• Shimming a JS library to be a Node module changes global scope to be private scope. Hopefully everything in the library is namespaced so that all of its functionality can be exported as a single module, but if it's not, you might have to modify the shimmed code to explicitly attach things to window (which is easy but not recommended) or split the code up into separate files/modules.
• Both Browserify and Gulp use streams in their JS API, but Browserify uses native Node streams while Gulp uses Vinyl streams. Since they don't play well together, you'll probably have to use vinyl-source-stream to adapt Gulp to Browserify (e.g. for renaming files in a Browserify pipeline), or use vinyl-transform to adapt Browserify to Gulp (e.g. wrap a Browserify stream for use in a Gulp pipeline).