Make token private

[Spencer Nicol]

How do i label some tokens as being private? I have some tokens that i want to exist soley to be referenced by aliases, but not be included with the final output?

[Drew Powers]

You may be interested in following this issue on the official specification repo. Though there’s nothing in the specification that currently permits this, it does seem like the authors are open to the idea.

If we get to the point there’s loose consensus on how private tokens should be handled, I’m open to adding to this library. But I don’t want to jump the gun and add the wrong thing here and have the spec follow a different path.

[Spencer Nicol]

Thanks @drwpow this makes a long of sense and I appreciate the quick response. I'm really excited to give these tools a shot, I've recently been deep in the weeds with style-dictionary, but after stumbling upon this library I feel like it makes way more sense and it will significantly cut out the need for me to manage all of these transformers, formatters, etc, so i'm hoping your library becomes the silver bullet.

[Drew Powers]

Yeah I’m a big fan of Style Dictionary. And the W3C Design Tokens spec wouldn’t be what it is without all the awesome research and exploration Style Dictionary did. But the new spec is an improvement over SD in my opinion. And hopefully it becomes a more universal standard for design tokens in general.

[John Barreiros]

Hopefully the spec eventually lands on naming.

If it's cool, I'd like to submit an idea for a temporary workaround. The basic idea is chaining plugins.

/**
 * Filters out $private tokens, and then pass the remaining tokens to the
 * passed plugin.
 *
 *  Token:
 * { "$value": "rebeccapurple", $type: "color", "$private": true }
 *
 * Config:
 * plugins: [
 *   pluginOmitPrivate({
 *     plugin: pluginCSS({ ...options... })
 *   })
 * ]
 */
export default function pluginOmitPrivate(options = {}) {
  return {
    name: 'plugin-omit-private',
    async build({ tokens, metadata }) {
      // TODO keep an eye on https://github.com/design-tokens/community-group/issues/110
      const filteredTokens = tokens.filter((token) => token?.$private !== true)

      return await options.plugin.build({ tokens: filteredTokens, metadata })
    },
  }
}