Allow manifest.ts to be an entry for config-webextension

[everdimension]

🙋 feature request

Currently, it's only possible to have a static manifest.json file as an entry for @parcel/config-webextension config.

This makes it hard to have some conditional configuration for development and production.

If manifest.ts was allowed as an entry, it would be trivial to accomplish this.

💻 Examples

For my case, I want content_scripts policies to be different for development and production environments. I.e. I want to be able to write something like this:

"content_scripts": [{
  ...,
  "matches": ENV === 'production' ? ["https://*/*"] : ["http://*/*", "https://*/*"],
}]

Thanks!!

[everdimension]

Related: #8404

[mischnic]

You can preprocess the manifest with some other transformer before the builtin transformer sees it. And I think something more declarative would be better instead of allowing arbitrary Javascript (which is another whole can of worms). E.g. some kind of template syntax in strings that gets replaced (similar to EJS/Nunjucks/...).

[everdimension]

@mischnic Hello, thank you for replying!

I do not consider template syntax as a better solution than arbitrary javascript. It's natural to write config in code.

But if one decides to go this way, then I think github action expression syntax can be used as inspiration.

---

You can preprocess the manifest with some other transformer before the builtin transformer sees it

Can you please provide an example of how this can be done? I'm not very familiar with parcel's transformer pipeline.

[mischnic]

{
  "extends": "@parcel/config-webextension",
  "transformers": {
    "manifest.json": ["parcel-transformer-something", "..."]
  }
}

(the "..." will cause it to continue with the existing webext transformer)
parcel-transformer-something then does

const {Transformer} = require('@parcel/plugin');

module.exports = new Transformer({
  async transform({asset}) {
    let code = await asset.getCode();
    asset.setCode(applySomeTemplating(code));
    return [asset];
  }
});

(see https://parceljs.org/plugin-system/transformer/)

[101arrowz]

Duplicate of #8138