Depending on a Javascript library via nix

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1

I’m trying to make the following work:

  • projectA is a Javascript project with a package.json etc.; running npm install && npm run-script build compiles it to some .js files in ./dist.
    I’ve packaged this up as a nix package. Its output is that ./dist folder.
  • projectB is a second Javascript project that depends on projectA. This is currently encoded by having "projectA": "file:../projectA" in package.json; now I can build projectB against the version of projectA that happens to have been built locally. This kind of works for development but is clearly a bit of a mess.
    I don’t know how to package this as a nix package. (Well, I’ve hacked around it by checking in the build output for now.)

What I would like is to be able to have projectB depend on projectA on a nix level. E.g. when using flakes, make the projectA git repo an input to projectB. (While also dealing with regular npm dependencies somewhat conveniently.) Does anyone have an example of a setup like this? Is it a bad idea?

(I think what I’m fundamentally struggling with is that npm doesn’t build dependencies, but only copies them over. So it expects me to either release the build output of projectA somewhere before I can depend on it, or to depend on the source of projectA directly. Does that seem accurate?)