[RFC] CLI flag to specify action to run after bundling finishes

As @microcipcip pointed out, Parcel doesn’t have any easy way to run a script after bundling finishes. So if you want to call some script that further processes the bundled files after they get bundled, there’s no easy way to do that from the CLI if you are running parcel in watch mode.

Implementation seems pretty straightforward but I wanted to get some feedback from the community before going ahead and implementing it.

Some Questions / Discussion Points

• What should we call the CLI flag?
  1. --postbundle?
  2. --then?
     • This actually looks pretty nice: parcel entry.abc --then script.js but might not be intuitive to everyone
  3. Anything else
• What should the command take as its input? Should it take a file name of a node script to execute, or should it take any arbitrary string containing some bash commands?
  1. parcel entry.abc -x script.js
  2. parcel entry.abc -x ‘node script.js’
     • Which allows you to use any command, like: parcel entry.abc -x ‘python somescript.py’

So ya, would love to get feedback from you guys on what you think about this and any thoughts you guys have on the things above.

[kirillrogovoy]

Just FYI.

I’ve been developing a server with Node and Typescript, and I needed to re-build the app and restart it on every file change.

That’s how I got here.

Anyway, I’ve solved it with Nodemon. Here’s how:

nodemon --exec 'parcel build src/server.ts --bundle-node-modules && node dist/server.js' -e ts --watch src

In other words, Nodemon watches src/ for changes in ts files and runs a specified command on each change.

[davidnagli]

Looks like we have consensus… there’s no real need for this feature at this point.

Sorry @microcipcip but I’m gonna close this issue, but let us know if you need help accomplishing this using the Bundler class.