NPM management of deployed front-end libraries

[danepowell]

BLT supports managing NPM dev dependencies via a theme's package.json file. You can easily define frontend hooks in project.yml that will install these dependencies during the build process. The libraries themselves (in node_modules) then get stripped before deployment (they are specifically excluded by BLT and also in the .gitignore in the deploy artifact.)

This is problematic for third-party frontend libraries that should be deployed, such as select2. Right now you can still add these as non-dev dependencies to your project.yml and run npm install --no-dev as a post-deploy hook, but the gitignore will still exclude them.

[grasmash]

Let's not gitignore them then.

[danepowell]

Yeah that should do the trick.