sneridagh
commented
1 day ago Disclaimer
This is an strategic PR, so it's overseen, done and implemented by the Volto Team.
Open tisto opened 3 days ago
sneridagh
commented
1 day ago This is an strategic PR, so it's overseen, done and implemented by the Volto Team.
PLIP (Plone Improvement Proposal)
Responsible Persons
Proposer: Víctor Fernández de Alba (@sneridagh)
Seconder: Timo Stollenwerk (@tisto)
Abstract
Volto, as any other modern JS application, relies on a bundler for producing builds of the transpiled and transformed code for production deployments and support for a full fledged development environment.
Volto is using currently Razzle as a bundler, however it has become obsolete and completely abandoned in the last years. This situation created a huge technical debt in a key element of the product. Volto can’t use some of the latest tooling or development experience improvements that the React ecosystem has provided during the last years.
After a study of the alternatives in the React ecosystem, it’s been decided to use Vite. This bundler has become the standard “de facto” bundler of many modern JS frameworks and apps. It’s flexible, pluggable, extensible and fast. It does not use Webpack (since Webpack is becoming problematic lately), but ESbuild and Rollup for the production bundling.
Assumptions
Vite is ESM, so it’s also future ready. This, along with the fact that it does not uses Webpack forced us to take some decisions and push for some breaking changes. All of them have a good reason behind them and in summary, it will resut in better and modern code using ESM and React artifacts, instead of relying on Razzle and Webpack magic.
Breaking changes
create-addons-loaderwill no longer load the config from the project itself.lodash-esmust be used instead oflodashbecause the latter is not compatible with ESM.@loadable/componentand Volto’s Loadables support only works for Webpack based builds, so they will be replaced them with standard Reactlazyinstances.index.jsbarrel import files are removed for allowing the build to better chunk splitting thanks to the above.doesNotContainClickfromsemantic-ui-reactwill be adopted in now core__CLIENT__and__SERVER__have to be replaced withimport.meta.env.SSRAll of them will be deprecated in Volto 18 so their use is already discouraged from Volto 18 on.
Deliverables
Removal of all Razzle artifacts, Webpack plugins, unused Babel plugins and config. Removal of related libraries from the devDependencies.
Except for the above deprecations and breaking changes the code and libraries used in Volto should not be changed, defining a baseline in which base future improvements that will be taking place in other PRs.
The result must pass all the existing tests and be linted following the existing configuration.
Risks
The breaking changes introduced will force to run upgrade steps not only in the project's code, but also in add-ons. All Razzle artifacts will have to be removed or updated. Add-ons maintainers will have to release major versions of them, and maintain compatibility matrixes to communicate properly which versions are ready for the new Vite buids.
We need to write outstanding documentation in order to make the process the smoothest possible.
Proposal & Implementation
The current work is at 70% and done in this PR: https://github.com/plone/volto/pull/6050
Participants
Víctor Fernández de Alba (@sneridagh) Piero Nicolli (@pnicolli) Volto Team (@plone/volto-team)