SWC is installed on production installation

[felixmosh]

Run next info (available from version 12.0.8 and up)

Operating System:
  Platform: darwin
  Arch: x64
  Version: Darwin Kernel Version 21.2.0: Sun Nov 28 20:28:54 PST 2021; root:xnu-8019.61.5~1/RELEASE_X86_64
Binaries:
  Node: 14.18.1
  npm: 6.14.15
  Yarn: 1.19.1
  pnpm: N/A
Relevant packages:
  next: 12.0.8
  react: 17.0.2
  react-dom: 17.0.2

What version of Next.js are you using?

12.0.8

What version of Node.js are you using?

14.18.1

What browser are you using?

Chrome

What operating system are you using?

macOS

How are you deploying your application?

other

Describe the Bug

When installing a production install using yarn install --frozen-lockfile --production

The size of Next.js is 77M,

3.2M	node_modules/caniuse-lite
 33M	node_modules/next
 44M	node_modules/@next

when @next size is basically due to swc.

 24K	node_modules/@next/env
 60K	node_modules/@next/react-refresh-utils
 44M	node_modules/@next/swc-darwin-x64

Why it got installed in production installation?

Expected Behavior

swc should not be installed in production installation.

To Reproduce

make an empty folder with the following package.json:

{
  "name": "next-swc-install",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "main": "index.js",
  "author": "felixmosh",
  "license": "MIT",
  "dependencies": {
    "next": "^12.0.8"
  }
}

And run yarn install --frozen-lockfile --production

[timneutkens]

Because npm does not give us any way to mark "development" vs "production", so there's no differentiation between what should be needed in production vs development.

If you want the Next.js app to run without node_modules and only the deps needed for the app you can use the new experimental flag outputStandalone that leverages the node-file-trace files to create a standalone Next.js app: https://nextjs.org/docs/advanced-features/output-file-tracing#automatically-copying-traced-files-experimental.

[felixmosh]

I've found that adding --ignore-optional to the install command helps.

[felixmosh]

Is @next/swc-darwin-x64 required for production run?

[MauriceArikoglu]

@timneutkens @leerob Is @next/swc-darwin-x64 required for production run?

[mostlylikeable]

Would be nice to understand if swc should be required in standalone production builds. I manually rm'd in production image build and got an error like this (next: v14.2.2):

code: 'MODULE_NOT_FOUND',
  at Module.load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1203:32) {
  at Module._extensions..js (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1422:10)
  at Module._compile (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1364:14)
  at Object.<anonymous> (/app/node_modules/next/dist/shared/lib/constants.js:283:34)
  at require (node:internal/modules/helpers:177:18)
  at mod.require (/app/node_modules/next/dist/server/require-hook.js:65:28)
  at Module.require (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1231:19)
  at Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:981:27)
  at /app/node_modules/next/dist/server/require-hook.js:55:36
  at Module._resolveFilename (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1140:15)
    - /app/server.js
    - /app/node_modules/next/dist/server/next.js
    - /app/node_modules/next/dist/server/config.js
    - /app/node_modules/next/dist/shared/lib/constants.js
  Require stack:
    Error: Cannot find module '@swc/helpers/_/_interop_require_default'

I assumed since it was part of compilation that it would be ok to remove for standalone app, but this error seems to indicate otherwise.

[ardokirsipuu]

Those swc helpers are needed. I just removed the @swc/core-<yourplatform-arch-etc> folder since that's the one that takes considerably more space than the rest of it.

I'm using the standalone output so I just added this to my next.config.js file (see docs):

  output: "standalone",
  outputFileTracingExcludes: {
    "./**/*": [
      "node_modules/@swc/core-*",
    ],
  },

and then the large swc binary will not end up in the standalone/node_modules folder anymore.