Metafile not output to the `outdir` about esbuild HOT 2 CLOSED

It seems as though the metafile is output to the the cwd and not the outdir when specified on the CLI.

The metafile is written out to the path you provide. All non-absolute paths provided on the command line are relative to the current working directory, as is typical for CLIs.

So I tried just the esbuild.build command and that did not work either (so I am thinking that there is some kind of configuration issue I have?).

The documentation for metafile is here: https://esbuild.github.io/api/#metafile. Note that only the CLI writes it to a file. The JS API esbuild.build returns it as an in-memory object, as you can see in the code example in the documentation:

import * as esbuild from 'esbuild'
import fs from 'node:fs'

let result = await esbuild.build({
  entryPoints: ['app.js'],
  bundle: true,
  metafile: true,
  outfile: 'out.js',
})

fs.writeFileSync('meta.json', JSON.stringify(result.metafile))

Additionally, when using the cli, metafile expects a file name. However, when you use build/context it is just a boolean flag.
If would be great if there was consistency between the API for metafile.

The CLI doesn't return the metafile as an in-memory object because that doesn't make sense for a CLI. The JS API actually used to work as you suggested (taking a file name instead of a boolean flag, and writing it to a file instead of returning it in memory), but in practice this was really annoying to use because you typically need to inspect the metafile object immediately after doing a build call. So the JS API was changed in version 0.9.0 to return it as an in-memory object instead (see #633). This change was intentional.

from esbuild.

Amazing, thank you! That actually makes perfect sense. Only comment would be that that was not immediately clear from the documentation, but a closer inspection of the types would have revealed that.

from esbuild.