I'm curious about why some repositories include a dist folder. Shouldn't repositories just store source code and not any builds or compiled files?
Let's take a look at an example with ES6 code.
package.json
{
"files": [
"dist",
"lib"
],
"scripts": {
"build:lib": "<transform ES6 to ES5 and put it in the ./lib folder>",
"build:umd": "<create a umd module and place it in the ./dist folder>",
"build": "npm run build:lib && npm run build:umd",
"postbuild": "<minify code>"
"prepublish": "npm run build"
}
}
This approach makes sense to me, and I have seen other repositories follow a similar structure. With this setup, the GitHub repo only contains src, while the npm repo includes only lib and dist.
Now onto another question: Why include dist and lib in npm? Most libraries can be easily installed with the command npm install. Additionally, we know that the prepublish script runs on local npm install (see npm-scripts). After installing a package, we already have the lib and dist folders. So why include this compiled code in npm when the source code is sufficient?