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importmap-rails
Use ESM with importmap to manage modern JavaScript in Rails without transpiling or bundling.
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WorkOS
The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS. The APIs are flexible and easy-to-use, supporting authentication, user identity, and complex enterprise features like SSO and SCIM provisioning.
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webpack
A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows for loading parts of the application on demand. Through "loaders", modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.
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For those who aren't ready to switch to import maps and don’t want to use Webpacker now that it is no longer a Rails default, jsbundling-rails was created. This gem adds the option to use webpack, rollup, or esbuild to bundle JavaScript while using the asset pipeline to deliver the bundled files.
As you may have heard by now, Rails 7 comes out of the box with importmap-rails and the mighty Webpacker is no longer the default for new Rails applications.
As you may have heard by now, Rails 7 comes out of the box with importmap-rails and the mighty Webpacker is no longer the default for new Rails applications.
For those who aren't ready to switch to import maps and don’t want to use Webpacker now that it is no longer a Rails default, jsbundling-rails was created. This gem adds the option to use webpack, rollup, or esbuild to bundle JavaScript while using the asset pipeline to deliver the bundled files.
For those who aren't ready to switch to import maps and don’t want to use Webpacker now that it is no longer a Rails default, jsbundling-rails was created. This gem adds the option to use webpack, rollup, or esbuild to bundle JavaScript while using the asset pipeline to deliver the bundled files.
If you, like me, are a Rails developer that needs to learn more about bundling and bundlers, a great starting point is this deep dive into the world of bundlers. If you're intested in full HMR without any speed loss, and you're willing to break out of the standard Rails offerings, you might enjoy vite-ruby.
Rather than using rails s, you’ll use bin/dev. bin/dev uses foreman to run multiple start up scripts, via Procfile.dev. We’ll make a change to the Procfile.dev later, but for now just know that when you’re ready to boot up your app, use bin/dev to make sure your assets are built properly.
To start, we’re going to use chokidar to watch our file system for changes, so that we can reload when we update a view or a CSS file, not just JavaScript files.
Today we created an esbuild config file that enables live reloading (but not HMR) for our jsbundling-rails powered Rails application. As I mentioned at the beginning of this article, this is very much an experiment and this configuration has not been tested on an application of any meaningful size. You can find the finished code for this example application on Github.
Finally, if you're using esbuild with Rails and Stimulus, you'll probably find the esbuild-rails plugin from Chris Oliver useful.