Using node2nix without generating an explicit `node-packages.nix`

[lenianiva]

Is there a way to use node2nix in a flake like crate2nix? In crate2nix, the intermediate Cargo.nix file does not have to be checked into the repo but instead can be generated on the fly: https://github.com/nix-community/crate2nix/blob/236f6addfd452a48be805819e3216af79e988fd5/tools.nix#L28.

[proxemy]

Oh yes please.

Not having the npm dependencies as a first class nix object but instead this two step process of first in terminal node2nix <project> and then in nix nodeDependencies = (pkgs.callPackage ./GENERATED_default.nix {}).nodeDependencies is a huge pain.

This makes wrapping external npm projects more complicated as it needed to be. The first counter argument made here

Does not scale, packages can not be updated in isolation, big amount of code changes are impossible to review

is very valid.

It should be something like

let
  node_modules = (pkgs.node2nix external_node_project_src).nodeDependencies;
in