Microbundle VS Rollup

We’ll also use Microbundle for bundling our modules. Let’s create the package using Lerna:

This definition is tailored to microbundle but the tldr is property names can have large impact on size .

To begin, you need to prepare your environment. A few ways to build a React package include tools like Bit, Storybook, Lerna, and TSDX. However, for this tutorial, you will use a zero-configuration bundler for tiny modules called Microbundle.

I discovered microbundle lately, and I would like to share with you a mini template with the bare essentials and comfort to develop your packages with TypeScript.

For package authoring - microbundle is a handy boilerplate (I would avoid tsdx personally - it’s basically been abandoned for turborepo but that’s not apparent at first glance).

My tech stack was React + Typescript, Storybook for docs, vite.js for build instead of webpack, microbundle for bundling (basically a no-config rollup wrapper), and Google's release please bot for handling release/deployment.

Setting up a modern Typescript or Javascript development stack is a daunting task, there are a lot of moving parts, and sometimes the whole process seems like magic, so I switched to Microbundle. While microbundle handles the compilation, there are a lot of other moving parts that need to be set up to start developing with Nodejs/Typescript (CI, tests, linting, etc). So I've created an opinionated template repository with Typescript, Microbundle, Jest, eslint, husky, prettier, github actions, pnpm, and a bunch of other scripts. It enables me to start developing a library immediately by using the repository as a starter template. Let me know what you think and if some processes could be improved, or some valuable tools that could be added. Pull requests and suggestions are welcomed.

I would recommend starting by using https://github.com/developit/microbundle , as it has pretty good default behavior for generating library output.

Check out microbundle, which is what TSDX started as a typescript alternative to.

Vite is a modern frontend build tool used to develop fast and super efficient web applications. It serves files instantly and ensures that changes are updated immediately after they are implemented. It makes use of Rollup for optimized builds and has support for when you want to build a Javascript library (instead of a full app).

In 2025, mastering Vite for your React projects means leveraging powerful configurations, intelligent optimizations, and a robust plugin ecosystem. By understanding Vite’s modern architecture—native ES modules (ESM) during development and optimized Rollup bundling for production—you can significantly streamline your workflow, improve developer experience, and deliver fast, performant applications at scale.

6. Production-Ready Code Vite uses Rollup for production builds, which optimizes the code by bundling it efficiently, performing tree shaking, and minifying JavaScript. This results in smaller, optimized production builds that are ready for deployment.

Meanwhile, esbulid (developed in Go language, as introduced earlier) and rollup can also be used separately as packaging tools, and many third-party JS plugins are packaged using rollup.

npm packages dramatically sped up the productivity of developers by being able to leverage other developers' work. However, it had a major disadvantage: cjs was not compatible with web browsers. To solve this problem, the concept of bundlers was born. browserify was the first bundler which essentially worked by traversing an entry point and "bundling" all the require()-ed code into a single .js file compatible with web browsers. As time went on, other bundlers with additional features and differentiators were introduced. Most notably webpack, parcel, rollup, esbuild and vite (in chronological order).

Rollup is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. Rollup Documentation

The JS SDK now lets you opt out of specific modules you don't need and optimize the final bundle size. You can do that by using either of two popular JavaScript build tools: Rollup or Webpack.

Rollup.js is a JavaScript module bundler that compiles small pieces of code into larger, more complex applications. It is particularly well-suited for bundling ES6 modules and is known for its efficient tree-shaking capabilities, which eliminate unused code from the final bundle, resulting in smaller file sizes.

Rollup bundles runtime artifacts.

This is also a valid approach, but what we really want is to be able to write our code in TypeScript and have it transpile into the JavaScript we need. Enter Rollup.