Install instructions don't work and Vite hangs forever on init

[burlesona]

Hey, @ElMassimo, not sure if I even know where to start to turn this into a proper issue report (hence I started a discussion instead), but basically Vite Rails doesn't seem to work. Two main issues I've run into so far:

1. If I run bin/vite dev it doesn't start the dev server, it just prints the commands as if I hadn't entered a command at all.
2. After updating my rails app to use Vite, the server tries to process a request and it does say "building with vite" but it just hangs there forever and never builds.

I know this is a crappy kind of bug report, but I would love to get onto something faster than web pack, and this seems to be a fairly new thing that I imagine you're still working the kinks out of? If that's right and you'd be up for it, I'd be happy to hop on a video chat sometime and we could work on it together to figure it out.

Cheers!

• Andrew

[cangencler]

Same problem here.

rails version: 5.2.2
node version 14.13.0

[ElMassimo]

Hey there!

I've been using the integrations for the past three weeks without hiccups. The project is fully tested, and there are live examples that build as expected on CIs and Heroku.

Please run bin/vite info and post the result, as well as the node version and other relevant npm packages.

Is npx available in your system? Are vite and vite-plugin-ruby installed in the project and which versions? The installation script should have added them, but a user recently mentioned that they were not installed. If you can paste the output of running bundle exec vite install, that would help me to understand what might cause it and fix it for future installations.

To confirm whether it's environment-related, please run this example, or the Rails example in this repo.

• If the examples work for you, then perhaps you can share an example repo where the problem occurs.
• If the examples don't work, then it's environment-related, and we should investigate what's happening inside the Ruby process. If you run bundle open dry-cli, and add a debugger statement, it should be possible to figure out why the dev command is not found. Same by running bundle open vite_ruby. For debugging, I like to use pry.

Sorry for the long response, but I won't have computer access until next Wednesday, so I'd like to give you a few options to try in the meantime.

[ElMassimo]

Fixed installation of JS packages in #23, and made some changes to prevent silent failures.

[ElMassimo]

Based on the logs provided in #22, it's most likely that you have experienced a bug in the installation process, which caused vite and vite-plugin-ruby not to be installed.

Add both packages to your development dependencies and install them, and the problem should go away.

[burlesona]

Hey @ElMassimo, this did "fix the problem" in a way, thanks!

It also uncovered a new thing. Possibly this is worth a new discussion thread, just let me know.

I use Tailwind, and bundling with Vite was unfortunately just as slow as Webpacker (12 seconds for any change to a CSS file). Do you know anything about Vite and Tailwind - is Tailwind just a dog?

There were also several issues where Tailwind dependencies (postcss plugins) had to be explicitly added to the devDependencies list, whereas with Webpacker those were loaded implicitly after having Tailwind as a dependency. Not sure if you've run into that before.

Any thoughts? Thanks for being responsive and engaged here, I know it's kind of a PITA doing OSS work and I'm grateful you're willing to take the time to chat about it :)

[ElMassimo]

Now that you mention it, I've been contributing to a new project to address that pain point.

It's called Windi CSS, it has a Vite plugin, and I've made a new documentation website for it. Also created a Discord server, where you can ask questions.

You should be able to get insane load times in comparison.

Adam Wathan (creator of Tailwind CSS) was impressed with Windi CSS, and is currently implementing something similar himself after learning about it.

@burlesona Give it a try, and let me know how it goes, I think you won't be disappointed.