Banal

On-demand bundle analyzer, powered by esbuild.

Features

This little terminal app exists because Bundlephobia and bundlejs are pretty cool and useful, but bundling locally and with offline support can easily work more reliably.

• Simple: the way this app works is super simple, it just generates the metadata file for the bundler analyzer in a temporary directory, embeds it inside the bundle analyzer itself, and opens it.
• Secure: postinstall scripts are disabled for security reasons, and only dependencies I personally maintain and esbuild are used.
• Available: unless NPM itself is unreachable, or esbuild can't bundle your modules, this bundle analyzer will always be available.
• Customizable: some important options, like the target platform or the target format, can be configured. Unlike in Bundlephobia where for many modules bundling will just fail.
• Offline support: esbuild's amazing bundle analyzer is embedded within the app, so the analysis can potentially even work if you are offline, if NPM has the modules you want to analyze cached already.
• Sharing support: a single HTML file is generated, specific to the analyzed modules, so it can be shared trivially.

Install

npm install -g banal

Usage

https://github.com/fabiospampinato/banal/assets/1812093/554327fa-c070-44af-89fb-52eff57a70ce

Some example usages:

# Analyze a single module
banal crypto-sha

# Analyze a single module, at a specific version
banal crypto-sha@1.0.0

# Analyze a single module, with the module flag set explicitly (optional)
banal -m crypto-sha

# Analyze a single local module
banal ./src/index.ts

# Analyze a single namespaced module
banal @fabiospampinato/is

# Analyze multiple modules together
banal crypto-sha crypto-puzzle

# Analyze a Node module
banal -p node -m banal

# Analyze an esbuild metafile
banal -M ./path/to/metafile.json

# Analyze a single module with a custom input file
banal -m @fabiospampinato/is -i 'export {isWeakRef} from "@fabiospampinato/is";'

# Analyze a module with some custom defined globals
banal --define '{"process.env.NODE_ENV": "\"production\""}' crypto-sha

# Output the esbuild analysis to a custom path
banal --output-analysis analysis.html crypto-sha

# Output the esbuild metafile to a custom path
banal --output-metafile metafile.json crypto-sha

Related

• Banal for VSCode: The official companion extension for Banal, for quickly inspecting the bundle size of npm dependencies.

License

• App: MIT © Fabio Spampinato
• Bundler & Analyzer: MIT © @evanw