Brython does not play well with Webpack

Once installed with npm, doing:

require('brython');

in a JavaScript project fails with TypeError: Cannot read property 'name' of undefined. The line of code responsible for this error is:

$B.isNode=(typeof process !=='undefined')&&(process.release.name==='node')

A (outrageously ugly) workaround for that is to do the following before requiring brython:

process.release = { name: 'This is not Node' };

I feel like this project would benefit from working with Webpack, in order to be included in bigger projects.

Also, I understand brython sets a global variable instead of exporting the main function from the JS package.

[PierreQuentel]

Anyway, fixing this issue might not be too difficult for now without going through this Webpack refactor, should I change this file: https://github.com/brython-dev/brython/blob/master/www/src/brython.js#L11 ? I feel like it is somewhat generated (from Python?).

If you haven’t yet, you can take a look at the page about how Brython works; it gives an idea of the project structure. Development is made on “individual” scripts in directory www/src; brython.js is generated from these scripts by the Python program scripts/make_dist.py.

For testing, I usually replace brython.js in the test page by all the individual scripts; you can copy and paste the list from a page such as sort_table.html.

Tell me if I can help in any way, but to be honest I don’t want to learn yet another tool in the Javascript ecosystem. It’s already a lot of work to maintain Brython…

[vrescobar]

is there any progress in this front? nowadays it is necessary to actually be webpack compatible, it helps to split, pack, minimize and load on demand parts of the stdlib on demand and to play well with the rest of the JS ecosystem.