single-spa VS lerna

At JupiterOne, we've made a significant transition from a monolithic frontend to a distributed frontend architecture using microfrontends, powered by (single-spa-react)[https://single-spa.js.org/]. This architectural shift has brought many benefits, such as lazy loading sections of the app and accelerating our development cycle. However, like any significant change, it has also come with its set of challenges.

Single-SPA Framework - One of the most popular choices. It has a large community behind it and offers robust routing and lifecycle management for microapps. Ref - https://single-spa.js.org/

Joel Denning is the visionary behind single-spa, boasting profound insights into the true mechanics of the web and is, in my view, a pioneer in micro frontend architecture. I highly recommend checking the single-spa website and his YouTube channel. While the videos might appear dated at first glance, rest assured, Joel is ahead of his time, and the content remains incredibly relevant today.

You got me curious and I found that single spa is something new to me - if I read https://github.com/single-spa/single-spa then I reckon you can use Svelte(Kit) in such framework - like you can use angular etc

I’ve actually done that “web components as the interoperability layer”!

It was this old angular 1.8 app with new features being written in angular-hybrid-ized angular 8. Ripping out angular-hybrid and separating the angular 1.8 routes from the modern angular routes was difficult, but now they were totally separate.

The only thing linking them together was an object with some RXJS streams in it for state, and a little in-house wrapper “app” who just loaded one component or another depending on the URL and a hash of routes for config. (I’d probably use SingleSPA [1] now. Same thing really.)

We could deploy them separately since the build just ends up being another JS file somewhere that just gets included with a script tag at runtime. No version bumping! No big mega build!

We started replacing the remaining “old” routes 1 by 1 with a “new” counter part. That was the easiest part, and went at a pace devs were comfortable with (fast enough) and business folk could tolerate. (modular enough to not HAVE to be done all at once)

Last I checked, the angular 1.8 stuff is gone years ago. :)

[1] https://single-spa.js.org/

Module Federation is not the unique solution, for example single-spa

You may want to look into using single-spa to run Vue 2 and Vue 3 side by side while you're migrating. Once your app is fully converted, you can stop using single-spa

Single-SPA and module federation are potent tools for building scalable micro-frontends. Single-spa provides a framework for building a modular front-end application. It allows lazy loading of micro-frontends, which helps improve the application's performance. In contrast, module federation enables communication and dependency sharing between different micro-frontends. It reduces code duplication, which can help with scaling an application.

Open the project up in your favorite IDE. Let's take a quick look at the project organization. The project has an Angular frontend and NestJS API backend housed in a Lerna monorepo. If you are curious about how to recreate the project, check out the repo's README file. I'll include all the npx commands, CLI commands, and the manual steps used to create the project.

Lerna currently maintained by Nx team

On Netlify's enterprise tier, approximately 46% of builds are monorepos, with the majority leveraging Nx and Lerna. Recognizing this trend, Netlify has focused on enhancing the setup and deployment experiences for monorepo projects. In particular they worked on an "automatic monorepo detection" feature. When you connect your project to GitHub, Netlify automatically detects if it's part of a monorepo, reads the relevant settings, and pre-configures your project. This eliminates the need for manual setup. This feature also extends to local development via the Netlify CLI.

This is the exact problem monorepos were born to solve. Not only will a monorepo let you share UI components, you'll be able to gradually add shared application logic as well (for instance, do all of your apps have their own logic for connecting to a database? you could roll that into a shared library with a monorepo). There are a lot of tools for accomplishing this in JS, but probably the most popular is lerna, which is built on top of NX (though lots of teams roll their own monorepo in nx without lerna, which IMO is a totally valid option).

To begin, you need to prepare your environment. A few ways to build a React package include tools like Bit, Storybook, Lerna, and TSDX. However, for this tutorial, you will use a zero-configuration bundler for tiny modules called Microbundle.

If so, are you using a monorepo tool like Nx or Lerna? If not, start there and see if it solves your problem.

I mean I don't know what your monorepo looks like, but for example infernojs (actually written with typescript) uses lerna, and lerna seems simpler than typescript references

Tools for publishing, such as Lerna (when using the --conventional-commit flag), follow this convention when incrementing package versions and generating changelog files.