Dependencies and module context

docs/_meta.js above is imported by nothing. The graph cannot discover it, so without a word from the plugin a change to it rebuilds nothing — and the failure shows up as a page that is quietly out of date, which is the worst kind to debug.

Rollup's answer is this.addWatchFile(), a call you can forget to make. Here the dependency is a field of the value you return, which is not forgettable in the same way. Relative paths resolve like every other path in a run, and come back absolute:

--- watchFiles --- ["/app/docs/_meta.js", "/app/main.js", "/app/hello.txt"]

start is where a whole-build dependency goes — a config file, a manifest — since it has no module to hang an answer on:

start: { handler: () => ({ dependsOn: ["esdev.json"] }) }