Running the preview server with npx shouldn't need to install it as a devDependency

[tmcw]

Goals

1. Run npx react-email dev

Background

We've been using npx to run the react-email preview server because it has a lot of heavy dependencies that slow down development and deployment for no reason, because they aren't necessary for CI or for deployment.

Using npx feels like a good solution to this problem: we run react-email on the fly when necessary, instead of having it add ~300MB to our node_modules directory. Using react-email shouldn't cost every single deployment of our application 300MB of cache or download size, and 4,246 extra lines in package-lock.json. It also seems unnecessary: the whole point of npm binaries under npx is that you don't need to install them - why prompt an installation like that?

Proposal

Ideally, react-email's dev server would be lightweight, but I know that's a pretty big undertaking. But why not make it possible to run the server without adding it to dependencies?

[gabrielmfern]

I suppose we could make some changes to not need installing when being run with npx. But at the same time, you are going to have it installed on your machine, if not in your project.

But, thinking about what you said that having it installed adds in MB of cost on a deployment for you, you shouldn't have that at all. You are installing with npm install --omit=dev there, right? If so, the sizes of the CLI and the preview server shouldn't affect your production deployments.

[tmcw]

You are installing with npm install --omit=dev there, right? If so, the sizes of the CLI and the preview server shouldn't affect your production deployments.

When we deploy the application or run tests in CI, we build the application, and the tools to build the application are devDependencies. So, deployment times and test times are affected by devDependency weight - and this is a very large devDependency.

[hillac]

Yeah to avoid installing 300MB in testing ci pipelines which need Dev deps, we moved it to optional dependancies. This is just a good idea even if it were light weight.

Still, most of its dependency packages are not needed to be installed to run the preview server and shouldn't be dependencies, It doesn't even require any code changes, just moving them in package.json.

This also benefits supply chain security by removing 300 packages from your computer and cicd environments.