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Attachment

Intro​

While the packageanalyzer itself only collects the package.json during the traversal of the dependency tree, it's the Attachment that adds any custom data along the way.

An Attachment is a function that gets executed for each package in the dependency tree. It can be used to fetch additional data from external sources, perform calculations, or run any other custom logic. The data returned by the Attachment is then associated with the package and can be accessed later.

This makes it possible to enrich the package data with any information you need, for example:

  • Weekly download counts from npm.
  • Bundle size from a service like bundlephobia.
  • Information from the GitHub repository of the package.

The data added by an Attachment is then made available in the Package class.

Further reading​

Please see Creating an Attachment to see how you can create a basic Attachment.