How to use ESBuild in Rails with JSBundling Discussion

This is awesome, I have been using it for a couple of weeks now. I didn’t necessarily think webpacker was slow, except maybe on Heroku builds. But when you use this, you wonder why you put up with webpacker for so long :)

Does it make sense to have esbuild-rails built into Rails? And should the esbuild.config.js file go in the /config folder or do files in that folder have to be Ruby?

you can do so with bundling or code-splitting, plugins, and more.

I am trying to run away from my webpack. Is it possible to handle react with jsx plus scss files imported ? Especially, scss files are located in app/javascript ?

This is great. Super easy to use and I don't feel like I have to dedicate a month to reading about optimization like webpacker.

The only problem I'm having is that, with an application loaded with controllers, the application.js build gets large pretty quickly. With webpacker, I used a plugin that spit out entrypoints for each controller, so that I could use them on a page-by-page basis (and also import third-party libraries within those controllers to avoid large packs).

I took a look at the esbuild documentation and was able to get sourcemaps by adding sourcemaps: true to the build in esbuild.config.js (using esbuild-rails). I tried splitting: true, format: "esm" but some of my controllers stopped working in unpredictable ways. I gather that it's still very much a work in progress.

I'm trying to wrap my head around a way to separate those controllers without creating import files for each.

It is so fast that I thought it wasn't working and something was wrong.

I'm not really huge into js, just want to sprinkle a few bits of ujs/stimulus/jquery type stuff in there and I usually find thats enough to get a lot done. Its been bewildering recently with webpacker to get simple stuff working at times. thanks for this video explaining more of whats going on.

Is it possible to include coffeescript files into our application.js using this new js bundling system?

I'm trying to import like this:
import "./trixmodz"

My file is here:
app/javascript/trixmodz.coffee.erb

but get an error

[watch] build finished
20:01:04 js.1 | [watch] build started (change: "app/javascript/admin.js")
20:01:04 js.1 | ✘ [ERROR] Could not resolve "./trixmodz"
20:01:04 js.1 |
20:01:04 js.1 | app/javascript/admin.js:13:7:
20:01:04 js.1 | 13 │ import "./trixmodz"
20:01:04 js.1 | ╵ ~~~~~~~~~~~~

I keep getting the following routing error, but it looks like it's compiling correctly, maybe?

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches [GET] "/assets/application.js-9dcbd890262770cf8651cbbfafa5b33aa1a83c242962fe28a6539c5725786e6d.map"):

Hi! I wanted to watch this episode but got this error "This stream is not available anymore"
(I'm not sure whether you will get the exactly same error message, I translated it from Russian "Эта прямая трансляция больше не доступна.")

Hi, the production deployment is failing for me. I'm using Capistrano for the deployment, below you can find the details.

jsbundling-rails: Command build failed, ensure yarn is installed and `yarn build` runs without errors
/home/deploy/truemango/shared/bundle/ruby/3.1.0/gems/jsbundling-rails-1.0.2/lib/tasks/jsbundling/build.rake:5:in `block (2 levels) in <main>'
/home/deploy/truemango/shared/bundle/ruby/3.1.0/gems/rake-13.0.6/exe/rake:27:in `<top (required)>'
/home/deploy/.rbenv/versions/3.1.1/bin/bundle:25:in `load'
/home/deploy/.rbenv/versions/3.1.1/bin/bundle:25:in `<main>'
Tasks: TOP => assets:precompile => javascript:build

Do I have to add any Capistrano task?

Please help me to resolve this issue.

Thanks.

I'm loving this episode! Thanks for the help.

This works great, but I'm having trouble getting esbuild to pick up css from node modules. Do you have any suggestions?

I keep running into this issue when I run ./bin/dev
everything else seems to run

Error: Can't find stylesheet to import.
16:49:51 css.1 | ╷
16:49:51 css.1 | 1 │ @import 'bootstrap/scss/bootstrap';
16:49:51 css.1 | │
16:49:51 css.1 | ╵
16:49:51 css.1 | app/assets/stylesheets/application.bootstrap.scss 1:9 root stylesheet

Rails 7.0.4
Ruby ruby 3.1.2p20 (2022-04-12 revision 4491bb740a) [x86_64-darwin20]
yarn 3.2.3
npm -v 8.19.1 not sure if this is even needed

application.css
/* Error: Can't find stylesheet to import.

• ,
• 1 | @import 'bootstrap/scss/bootstrap';
• |
• '
• app/assets/stylesheets/application.bootstrap.scss 1:9 root stylesheet */

body::before {
font-family: "Source Code Pro", "SF Mono", Monaco, Inconsolata, "Fira Mono",
"Droid Sans Mono", monospace, monospace;
white-space: pre;
display: block;
padding: 1em;
margin-bottom: 1em;
border-bottom: 2px solid black;
content: "Error: Can't find stylesheet to import.\a \2577 \a 1 \2502 @import 'bootstrap/scss/bootstrap';\a \2502 \2575 \a app/assets/stylesheets/application.bootstrap.scss 1:9 root stylesheet";
}

any ideas

@PatJames
// /app/assets/stylesheets/application.scss
@import 'bootstrap';

// /app/assets/stylesheets/bootstrap.scss
@import 'bootstrap/scss/bootstrap';

// /app/javascript/application.js
// Entry point for the build script in your package.json
import "@hotwired/turbo-rails"
import "./controllers"
import * as bootstrap from "bootstrap"

I have been looking at Rails 7 and am now working on trying to upgrade an app using importmaps. In other words I don't have a big app working with esbuild. My notes on say what I put in above is based on https://www.bootrails.com/blog/rails-7-bootstrap-5-tutorial/.

esbuild builds js faster, but it looks like a bundle size is not a priority for it. I used the approach from the lesson and ended up with ~100MB application.js as a result. Not sure if I can call it a production-ready solution 🤷‍♂️.

I have put some details here https://github.com/rails/jsbundling-rails/issues/143.

As long as you use rails g stimulus new_controller_name updates index.js and create a controller.

i am on rails 7.1.beta and when i run bin/dev i get this error on console:

15:41:20 js.1 | exited with code 0
15:41:20 system | sending SIGTERM to all processes
15:41:20 css.1 | exited with code

but rails server command works. any idea why?

I just upgraded an enterprise Rails 6 sprockets 3 app to rails 7, that used webpacker 4 built css and renders react components occasionally. It's about 8 years old so it was the craziest upgrade. I tried shakapacker, vite-rails, esbuild, cssbundling, and pretty much anything in between. What ultimately ended up working was unwinding the scss from webpacker, and then going to sprockets 4 and dartsass-rails. once the site worked exactly the same, I went to jsbundling-rails with esbuild and slowly moved each entrypoint to their new app/javascript folder. I wanted to get the file structure back to a more rails default instead of ui > js > sccs. (although I left all the react-rails files in the ui folders). I didn't need to do any jquery import fixes. I just added //= require jquery3 in the assets/javascripts jquery.js file. Then load javascript_include_tag "jquery" in application.html

I'll probably write up a blog post about challenges of upgrading an app that had over 30 contributors over almost a decade.