Nitromodule template adds nitrogen/ to ignore files

[hyochan]

When I create a project using the Nitromodule template, both .gitignore and .npmignore include the nitrogen/ directory by default (see attached screenshot).

However, based on advice from a Nitromodule maintainer, it seems that nitrogen/ should not be ignored.
Could you please confirm if this is intentional or if it needs to be updated?

Thanks in advance!
cc @mrousavy

[satya164]

.npmignore include the nitrogen/ directory by default

We don't generate any .npmignore file. And nitrogen is includes in files field which ensures that it'll be published to npm as well as script to generate the specs when publishing.

They should not be generated by the user and our template is not setup that way.

It's usually a bad practice to commit generated files to the repo. So we don't commit them. If you want to commit them for some reason, it's upto you to decide. #846

As long as nitrogen is deterministic, there should not be any stability issues. And if it's not deterministic, then it seems like an bug in nitro modules which can result in someone breaking a project just by changing one line and re-generating the code.

[mrousavy]

Nitrogen is deterministic, but I still recommend publishing nitrogen/ to npm, as well as committing it to git.

It's a middle-ground of pre-building and taking away responsibility of the user - the user does not need to have nitro-codegen installed. It's the library author's duty to ship buildable libs.

[mrousavy]

Your argument is good @satya164, but react-native core's build is also deterministic, yet they ship prebuild libraries.

So I think we 100% should ship it to the npm package, but committing it to git might be up for debate.

I usually commit it because I need to look at generated code a lot to improve Nitro.

[satya164]

but I still recommend publishing nitrogen/ to npm
yet they ship prebuild libraries

That's how our template is already setup as I linked in my response. The prepare script will automatically generate nitrogen specs before publishing to npm. The workflow doesn't require the consumer to generate the specs.

The only thing we don't do is commit them to git.

[mrousavy]

Yea I think that's valid.

I commit them to git in my case, but I don't have a strong opinion on what would be the preferred approach.
I guess I want to see in my diffs what also changed for the bindings, but whatever