bwatson78
commented
1 year ago Q: Is there a consensus in the Rails community on what to move to?
A: Yes, officially, the Rails community recommends to switch to jsbundling-rails if currently using Webpacker. They provide a switching guide on the Webpacker's Github page.
Q: Is there a consensus in the Samvera community on what to move to?
A: I've asked Hyrax Product Owner Daniel Pierce for an official recommendation, and he has deferred to the Rails and Blacklight communities recommendations. I see that two other Hyrax implementers have switched.
Anna Headley from Princeton used Vite, but Johnathan Rochkind from Science History Institute and Anna have detailed their frustrations with trying to tie Sprockets to it.
Justin Coyne from Stanford has utilized two different Gems: importmap-rails and the above-mentioned jsbundling-rails. In this thread, he mentions that jsbundling-rails is his go-to, but importmap-rails is fine for "simpler projects". (That sounds like a recommendation for jsbundling-rails, honestly.)
Q: Is there a consensus in the Blacklight community on what to move to?
A: Blacklight is full-steam ahead on incorporating importmap-rails into all future releases.
Q: Are there minimum version limits for Blacklight, Hyrax, or Rails we need to meet before moving?
A:
- For
jsbundling-rails, it appears that Rails must be v6 and above. No other dependencies are listed. - For Vite Ruby, it needs at least Ruby v2.5 and Rails v5.1.
- Concerning
importmap-rails, the requirements are Ruby >= v2.7 and Rails >= v6.0.
This means that we could move forward with Vite out-of-box and lean on Anna and Johnathan's experience for guidance, or choose to upgrade Rails to a v6.*, which our current version of Hyrax (and via dependency, Blacklight) supports. In one-off attempts to upgrade to Rails, we have run into complications--many of the rSpec tests fail.
Q: What resources are available to learn about the new solution? Are there examples of others making the same transition? Are there any institutions who we may want to talk to about their transition to the new thing?
A: Not only are there at least two organizations that have made the transfer, but Blacklight's currently installing with importmap-rails, so we can crib code from their transition. So, I say that the main resource would be the Github repos of each of the organizations that have switched and Blacklight. Our secondary source would be Slack communication with the Engineers that have worked on this swap-out. And or last bit of inspiration would be blog posts and readmes like the switching guide referenced above.
eporter23
Rails no longer uses webpacker and has moved on to... something else.