Highlights:

• New module specifier resolver that supports package exports and more
• “Parcel now supports plugins and config files written as native ES modules in addition to the existing support for CommonJS.”
• “Historically, Parcel v2 plugins have been required to be npm packages. [...] In Parcel v2.9.0, plugins can be referenced as relative paths from your .parcelrc config.”
• “In Parcel v2.9.0, we are switching the default minifier from Terser to SWC [...] The SWC minifier is around 7× faster than Terser, while producing comparable to even smaller output size.”
• “Symbol propagation is an algorithm that walks the full dependency graph of your project, and determines which exports of each module are actually used and which ones can be tree shaken away. In Parcel v2.9.0, this algorithm is now incremental.”
• Build performance tracing tracks “how much time is spent in each phase of your build, which plugins were called into, and how long is spent in each.”.

NPM recently added support for ‘Provenance’ banners, thereby boosting package credibility. It achieved this by proving that a package was published from a particular commit and using a particular GitHub Actions pipeline.

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In this article, we’ll talk about how you can get an easy-to-use, secure release pipeline that generates provenance statements, either by adding provenance support to your own existing pipeline, or by using our [open-source] Optic toolkit.