Webpacker VS jsbundling-rails

We will use Webpacker or JavaScript compiler and assets management. By following the webpacker installation guide, let’s add Webpacker and React to our application.

For example, there is a Ruby on Rails application that uses Webpacker and has JavaScript files that are covered by the system tests. Capybara is used as the system testing tool.

This is done through the Webpacker::DevServerProxy which is a rack middleware that is added by Webpacker.

Using Webpacker in Rails provides several advantages over the traditional asset pipeline. First, Webpacker uses JavaScript modules, which allows for better code organization and improved code reusability. Second, it offers modern frontend build tools, such as Babel and PostCSS, for transforming and compiling assets. Third, it provides faster build times and faster runtime performance through code splitting and lazy loading. Fourth, it offers better integration with JavaScript frameworks such as React, Vue, and Angular. Overall, Webpacker offers a more flexible and modern asset management solution for Rails applications. And while Webpacker is being retired, this initiative is to consolidate our code accordingly before moving our bundler to another solution.

This article is replace Webpacker with Simpacker and webpack.

in ruby ​​on rails 7 what is the best way to properly install Angular because I can't find any documentation about it. The only tutorial that exists uses webpacker (https://github.com/rails/webpacker) but unfortunately it is no longer supported and no longer up to date in terms of security.

From the webpacker gem:

Check this: https://github.com/rails/webpacker/issues/2825

instead of using webpacker you should move to esbuild or importmap. Webpacker has been retired a few months ago (cf https://github.com/rails/webpacker) There are videos explained how to set this up (e.g. for importmap https://learnetto.com/tutorials/how-to-use-react-with-rails-7

I think this is more like a demo - you will not get the same features as jsbundling-rails by only following instructions in the video. For that you will need to change some other files as well. You can find out what files to be added/changed from the install script. The important bits are mostly the same as in the video, but some supplement parts are not mentioned in the video. Some people actually reported in the comment that they can't deploy such app, but I think it depends.

I'm sorry, I didn't see that in your title. Using esbuild is 100% supported by Rails through this gem https://github.com/rails/jsbundling-rails. Have a look at the docs there to make sure that you're setup correctly.

Rails applications are bundler-agnostic. They do not care how you bundle your javascript code. It just expects whatever comes from the bundler to be placed under app/assets, so the asset pipeline processes it. We can see this in the official jsbundling-rails gem, which consists of scripts to install different bundlers and configure a default npm build command to generate our bundles—no interaction whatsoever with the Rails configuration. This black-box bundler logic allows us to change and update our bundler system without tuning any other aspect of our Rails application.

Hello, this is my first time setting up a rails app that also uses react, I am using https://github.com/rails/jsbundling-rails I went with esbuild because I am following this tutorial on setting it up https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoLJXjEV2nM, however when I run bin/dev in the terminal I get the error bin/dev: 8: exec: foreman: not found

You first install your asset handlers as you need them for your project. They can be anything from rails/jsbundling-rails and rails/tailwindcss-rails to webpacker or something custom.

The functionality comes from https://github.com/rails/jsbundling-rails and https://github.com/rails/cssbundling-rails -- both come with Rails 7 and all you have to do is generate your app with the choices you want such as -j esbuild --css tailwind.

The Rails https://github.com/rails/jsbundling-rails gem lets you pick between esbuild, rollup and Webpack. If Turbopack ends up being popular then jsbundling should be able to support it.

The nice thing about Rails now is there's no direct integration like Webpacker once was. Now we can basically use the JS tool straight up and Rails will just look at assets in a specific directory, it doesn't matter what tool generated it.