Improving maintenance and flexibility

[tbinna]

Problem

The plugin, in its current form, provides its own build executor. I see two issues with this approach:

• The plugin is opinionated about how the Froge app should be built.
• The build executor does more than just building the app (it also packages the Forge app by including Custom UI projects and patching the Forge manifest file).

These circumstances make it difficult to substitute the build target e.g. with vite or esbuild.

Suggested solution

Split the existing build executor into two targets: build and package, inspired by the Maven build lifecycle phases.

build: This is now a standard build target. The choice is with the user what they would like to use. The application generator provides a set of options that it can configure. However, the user could configure a custom build if they wanted to.

package: All existing executor code that's not build-related moves to a package executor. Its goal is to take the built (compiled) code and package it in its distributable format, i.e., whatever the Forge CLI expects. This means it would assemble the Forge app in the output path by copying built Custom UI dependencies (and later maybe also UI Kit 2) and patching the Forge manifest with the path to the actual output directory.

[tbinna]

We have released version 3.3.0-beta.2, including a package executor as described above. Refer to the release notes for details on how to use it. Please let us know if you find any issues.

In the next step, we are looking for people to test the package executor with their preferred standard build executor. We may release version 3.3.0 with the package executor if we do not find any significant issues during testing.

After that, we update the application generator to generate applications with a build target using a standard Nx executor and the package target instead of the custom build target. At the same time, we may deprecate the existing build executor.

If all goes to plan, we can remove the existing build executor with nx-forge version 4.

[tbinna]

The package executor has now been released in version 3.3.0.