Rails 8 Assets: Adding a bundled package alongside vanilla setup | Radan Skorić's website

Propshaft + importmap-rails works great but can’t cover all possible cases. When you start reaching for more complex npm packages, you might encounter packages that require some form of bundling. For example, let’s consider a relatively popular select UI package: Tom Select. Try pinning it: bin/importmap pin tom-select. It will appear to work, but using it will reveal it’s broken. The default build pulled from JSPM or JSDelivr isn’t completely bundled. It contains inline import calls that reference other files by relative path. These imports can’t be resolved because they reside in your application’s node_modules subfolder and aren’t exposed to the asset pipeline or included in your importmap. Does this mean switching our entire asset approach just to adopt this one package? Absolutely not, we can actually have our cake and eat it too. We can bundle just this one package and keep everything else unchanged.