distDir inside target does not get honored

[VincentVToscano]

Hi Devs & Community,

I am getting started with Parcel 2.0.0-rc.0 with a series of tests to verify if the workflow will be inline with my team's needs and ran into something that I was looking to get your help on. Enjoying the Parcel experience so far and am excited to get into more features soon. Thanks in advance.

❓
I am experimenting with targets, and I'd like to take advantage of the distDir option. I have been able to use this successfully when it is not in the targets object, but when I place inside the targets object, the default dist directory is created instead. I am running seeing this when I run the start command inside the package.json (the dev build).

🎛 Configuration

package.json

{
  "name": "ParcelTest001_2021",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "description": "Parcel test",
  "repository": "unknown",
  "author": "Vincent",
  "license": "UNLICENSED",
  "private": true,
  "targets": {
    "frontend": {
      "source": "index.html",
      "distDir": "../build"
    }
  },
  "scripts": {
    "start": "parcel",
    "build": "parcel build"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "parcel": "^2.0.0-rc.0"
  }
}

📁 Directory & File Structure

*ParcelTest001_2021*
└── build
└── src
    ├── home.js
    ├── index.html
    ├── package.json
    └── yarn.lock

🤔 Expected Behavior

Bundled files should be outputted into the build directory

😯 Current Behavior

Bundled files are outputted in the dist directory

🔦 Context

The option distDir under frontend target is ignored.

🌍 Your Environment

Parcel: 2.0.0-rc.0
Node: v16.8.0
Yarn: yarn-3.0.1.cjs
Operating System : macOS current

Thanks for your help

[aakoch]

Does it behave the same when package.json is in the root directory (instead of src)? I'm not used to seeing the package.json file anywhere but the root directory.

[VincentVToscano]

I have to check to see if it does. Will let ya know.

[mischnic]

parcel start doesn't use any manually defined target by default (among other reasons, because it wouldn't know which target to use if multiple are defined).

You can add --target frontend to the dev command to override that.

[VincentVToscano]

OK, so parcel start ignores and manually defined target objects a user defines in package.json. Taking you r suggestion, I should add CLI flag to allow for the override, and point to my defined frontend target. Thank you

[sarahrobichaud]

Parcel@2.6.0
node@16.13.1

I config looks like this

{
  "targets": {
    "resources": {
      "source": "resources/resources.html",
      "distDir": "dist/resources",
      "publicUrl": "dist/resources/"
    }
  }
}

I've tried parcel --target resources --no-hmr without success.

With the --target flag can I do multiple at once?

EDIT: Yes Parcel docs

parcel start doesn't use any manually defined target by default (among other reasons, because it wouldn't know which
target to use if multiple are defined).

It takes the correct source and publicPath, just not distDir, is it because its the only one defined?
Also any ideas?

EDIT: --target flag works with build but not serve nor watch.

I saw this mentionned in #8105, will just try to work around it for now.

[nitipit]

Just put config in package.json like this in the first target to make your build command follow --dist-dir

"targets": {
    "": {
            "outputFormat": "global",
            "optimize": true
        }
}