Sometimes you encounter a bad npm package. It’s not bad in terms of functionality - otherwise you might not want to use it. It’s bad in the sense that its setup doesn’t align with npm pkg requirements.

Was using social-share.js to create social share buttons. It works fine using script tags. But it doesn’t when imported/required from node_modules.

In a fine afternoon, I had fun debugging this one. Had the chance to refresh my memories on require.resolve, node --inspect, webpack loader and bunch of other stuff. Turned out:

In social-share.js’s package.json, it has

main: dist/js/share.min.js

That files doesn’t exist. It should be

main: dist/js/social-share.min.js

The difference was too small to be spotted from error messages. But how could this bug be written in the first place? It must be that they don’t use it as a npm package.