Installation is impossible, if not using Yarn or NPM

[henrikbjorn]

Trying to add Maglev to a site that is already using vite_rails seems to be impossible without jumping through a huge amounts of hoops.

It seems that Maglev is instantiating its own ViteRuby instance instead of using the singleton already available ViteRuby.instance and then forces the usage of yarn or npx.

Is there a reason for not "just" having a dependency added to package.json and using the normal flow for handling npm dependencies?

Also is there a reason for the "engine" custom vite configuration, instead of helping the user to configure their current setup?

[j-mcnally]

not a solution but willing to offer my take, that for rails users who dont use vite, the engine approach abstracts away a lot of the complexity.

[henrikbjorn]

@j-mcnally However, I do use vite_rails :)

I think that the best approach would be to do something like ActiveAdmin, which publishes a NPM package for their Javascript. Which would make me able to create an entrypoint and import that.

[did]

@henrikbjorn I'm going to see how difficult it is to add support for pnpm. 🤞

Regarding your solution, I'm not a big fan of the NPM package solution. The main reason is that it'd add an extra layer of complexity when releasing a new version (ie: plus potential version syncing issues).

[henrikbjorn]

@henrikbjorn I'm going to see how difficult it is to add support for pnpm. 🤞

Regarding your solution, I'm not a big fan of the NPM package solution. The main reason is that it'd add an extra layer of complexity when releasing a new version (ie: plus potential version syncing issues).

The complexity of a separate Vite install is also quite high, also since I suspect it will inherit the ENV configuration and with no real way to alter the Vite config for Maglev.

[henrikbjorn]

Also Vite is great, but wouldn't it be possible to have the same assets build already for usage with importmaps ?

That would also greatly decrease the barrier of usage for standard and new rails app, where importmaps are the defaut.