Of Bundles and Barrels

Until recently I’ve been an unequivocal fan of so called barrel files. They work like this:

// src/components/index.js
export * from './Foo'
export * from './Bar'
export * from './FooBar'

Which allows you to use components like this:

import { Foo, Bar, FooBar } from 'src/components'

Short and sweet! For this reason I’m also a happy user of the VSCode plugin Auto-barrel which helps with creating/updating these barrel files.

I did recently discover, however, that this pattern can have unwanted side effects. Re-exporting all your imports in an index file can result in large bundle sizes.

I gave it a try on one of the projects I’m working on (using Next.js) and lo and behold: Removing the barrel in the /components/ui folder reduced the initial bundle size by more than 35kb. The culprit: In the ui folder was a RichTextEditor component of 35 kB. Since it was re-exported this was included on every page using a component from the ui folder.

So be careful what you put in your barrels, if you care about bundle size!