Investigate source-map-support #215
Description
The above package, which is still the top search result for 'node source map support', hasn't been relevant for most users since Node 12, which brought native source map support to the platform.
While the maintainer does state as much in the readme, the trend is concerning, with downloads tripling to 70 million over the period, 5 years, from which it should have ceased to be relevant.
As the readme states, the preferred solution is:
- Pass
--enable-source-mapsas an argument, or - Set
NODE_OPTIONS=--enable-source-maps
TODO: For dev tools, is it possible to set the bin field in package.json to do this? Could it be done with a simple shell script shim?
EDIT: Yes! In fact all that's needed is to add the argument to the shebang line, e.g. #!/usr/bin/env node --enable-source-maps. The node exec/npx command understands this even on Windows.
The few cases where you really need this are:
node:vm, which doesn't let you specify this option externally (so, test runners might still need it);- serverless deployments, where you might not have control over how the runtime gets loaded (though in that case it should be done by the application code, not any other dependency); and
- where you have pledged to support node versions lower than 12 (which we would encourage everyone to stop doing anyway)
Top consumers are:
| # | Downloads | Traffic | Version | Package |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 163.78M | 4364.77 GB | ~0.5.20 | terser |
| 2 | 135.21M | 3603.37 GB | 0.5.13 | jest-runner |
| 3 | 32.45M | 864.77 GB | ^0.5.16 | @babel/register |
| 4 | 13.53M | 360.58 GB | 0.5.19 | @nx/js |
| 5 | 12.46M | 332.01 GB | 0.5.21 | @angular-devkit/build-angular |
| 6 | 12.03M | 320.51 GB | ^0.5.5 | karma-source-map-support |
| 7 | 9.96M | 265.56 GB | 0.5.21 | @angular/build |
| 8 | 9.13M | 243.22 GB | 0.5.21 | pm2 |
| 9 | 8.47M | 225.60 GB | ^0.5.21 | @swc-node/sourcemap-support |
| 10 | 7.97M | 212.38 GB | ^0.4.15 | babel-register |
| 11 | 7.51M | 200.21 GB | ~0.5.21 | @expo/cli |
| 12 | 6.99M | 186.25 GB | ^0.5.21 | @esbuild-kit/core-utils |
| 13 | 6.27M | 167.21 GB | ^0.5.21 | @cucumber/gherkin-utils |
| 14 | 5.37M | 143.10 GB | ^0.5.12 | ts-node-dev |
| 15 | 5.31M | 141.56 GB | 0.5.21 | @cucumber/gherkin-streams |
| 16 | 5.17M | 137.76 GB | ^0.x | teen_process |
| 17 | 4.32M | 115.22 GB | ^0.5.21 | @netlify/functions |
| 18 | 3.61M | 96.13 GB | ^0.5.6 | @pulumi/pulumi |
| 19 | 3.24M | 86.26 GB | 0.5.21 | @appium/support |
| 20 | 3.18M | 84.77 GB | 0.5.21 | @appium/schema |