How to keep Browserify bundle size sensible when using requires for thirdparty stuff (via grunt if it matters)

Question

I'm trying to bundle up my own code (A) which in turn uses 2 third party components (B and C) where C also needs B. Everything as far as I know is written using CommonJS node style modules.

A on its own when bundled comes out at 60K.

B is included separately and assumed to be global, I've got this working just fine by doing a dirty bit of a replace in my build step that swaps out require("B") with global.B

C is whats causing me issues though, its meant to be "just 8K" in size yet when I try bundling it up with A my bundle jumps up to 600K+ as I assume its pulling in dependancies galore?

This is not acceptable but I don't know how to get it any smaller as I don't know what the heck its pulling in (or more importantly what I can exclude to make it still work). I could try a binary chop with the exculsions but I'd don't know if that is a safe way or even sensible way to do it.

How can I bundle C up and only have my bundle come out at 68.5K (total size of both chunks of code 60k + 8.5k) and of course still work?

I'm new to node and browserify but I've been hammering on this for over a week so fair to say I've given it a good stab before putting my hand up.

Additional info if it matters:

• it needs to run server-side and client-side
• B is actually ReactJS
• C is actually React Router Component
• Using windows and c# via ReactJS.net...hey...wait...come back...tumbleweed

Answer 1

If you create an external bundle containing all your app's dependencies (B + C) and declare those modules as external when bundling your app's own code (A), then things should work as you expect.

I don't know the grunt-browserify config incantations for doing this, but the following show how you'd use browserify directly in some example gulp tasks, so the bundle creation should be reusable:

var browserify = require('browserify')
var gulp = require('gulp')
var source = require('vinyl-source-stream')

gulp.task('js-deps', function() {
  var b = browserify()
  b.require('react')
  b.require('react-router-component')
  b.transform('envify')

  return b.bundle()
    .pipe(source('deps.js'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('./build'))
})

gulp.task('bundle-js', function() {
  var b = browserify('./lib/app.js')
  b.external('react')
  b.external('react-router-component')

  return b.bundle()
    .pipe(source('app.js'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest('./build'))
})