v7.0 rewrite checklist

[yamalight]

This is an issue to track overall progress on v7.0 rewrite.
Plan is to rewrite / update code to use latest libs (not just versions) and ES modules (ES modules are not ready yet, dropping them?).
Additionally, I'm planning to implement exoframe-client library that provides simple API for interacting with server (would allow to create new client, e.g. dashboard as some people wanted).

All work is done on v7-rewrite branch.

Packages:

• exoframe-client
• exoframe-server
• exoframe-cli
• exoframe-recipe-ghost
• exoframe-template-java
• exoframe-website (incl. docs)

Planned major changes:

• Drop yarn support
  Reasoning: yarn v1 is deprecated and v2 is too different from v1. npm v7 now does most of things yarn v1 did.
• Drop plugins support
  Reasoning: swarm is deprecated. There are no other plugins and doesn't seem like they'd be useful 🤔
• Drop docker swarm support.
  Reasoning: support for it adds complexity, almost nobody uses swarm (k8s is a better solution for that problem), exoframe doesn't work well in those scenarios as a whole.
• Drop docker-compose support.
  Reasoning: compose-based deployments don't work well with exoframe (users has to manually add traefik labels, etc), which causes a lot of issues. there's also an issue with tearing down and rebuilding / restarting all services when you only want to update one. IMO the best way would be to deprecate it and describe how to deploy multi-service projects using plain exoframe configs.
• Drop exoframe-faas support.
  Reasoning: it's half-baked, rarely used but adds quite a bit of overhead to the server. Would be better to provide a guide to extra-slim docker containers (not quite FaaS, but should close enough for this project scope)
• Drop old / unused recipes and templates (include one of each as an example)
  Reasoning: it's hard to maintain / fix all of them with time (I kinda ended up abandoning most of them), so it's better to just have a few simple examples.

Things to address in code / deps:

• Fix update tests for exoframe-server (failing in CI)
• Fix deprecation warnings in exoframe-server
• Replace @zeit/ncc with @vercel/ncc. New ncc version doesn't work well, removed, will publish exoframe-server as-is.
• Update to eslint 8.x and eslint-plugin-import 3.x (?) to enable top-level await support
  • Re-enable eslint in CI for exoframe-server once done
• Refactor CLI config loading to be executed on every program creation, not just on load (helpful for tests)
• Try using new @vercel/ncc -> doesn't work since some deps are still CJS and exoframe-server is ESM. Mixing those two doesn't work well when bundling code 😑

Planned issues:

• use new standard crypto.randomUUID API for UUID generation
• Use XDG_CONFIG_HOME for config location (Move config file #309)
  • Server
  • Client
• More private key types (Allow using any type of private keys for auth #191)
  • Server
  • Client
• Removal of multiple deployments (Allow multiple IDS to be removed #291) (after some more thinking - bad idea, disregarding)
• Docker images hosted on github (Also provide docker images through github registry #302)
• Allow other types of mounts (Support other types of volumes #319)
• Allow passing build args from config to docker during build (Allow passing build args from config to docker during build #323)
• Deterministic deployment IDs (Keep the same UUID on Update Deploy, when using baseDomain on the server #275)
• New website (New website #259)
• Setup E2E tests in CI for that run basic tests for all packages

ToDos:

• Go through Dockerfile best practices repo (and this) and apply all that make sense to default dockerfiles used by exoframe
• Combine all repos to monorepo
• Archive all old repos

Things to document:

• Migration guide
• Docker-compose (why it's no longer supported, how to replace it with individual deployments)
• Docs for typical deployment cases (Document typical deployment cases #235)
• Docs for usage in CI / github action (Github Action for Exoframe #260)
• Docs for different types of mounts (Support other types of volumes #319)
• Docs for new baseDomain based deployment URLs (Keep the same UUID on Update Deploy, when using baseDomain on the server #275)
• Docs for more private key types (Allow using any type of private keys for auth #191)
• Docs for install script (release 6.2.1 #307)
• Docs for new traefik config (Supply Traefik config file #139, Document traefik config via config file #303)
• Docs for enabling traefik dashboard (Add way to enable traefik dashboard #147)
• Docs for build args config (Allow passing build args from config to docker during build #323)

Breaking changes (to keep track of them somehow):

• Node 18+ as minimum requirement (due to ESM)
• Removal of yarn
• Removal of plugins
• Removal of swarm
• Removal of compose
• Removal of exoframe-faas
• Config folder change (using XDG_CONFIG_HOME now)
• [todo]

Any feedback welcome.

[yamalight]

Apparently, jest currently doesn't support ES module mocking (see jestjs/jest#10025), so server rewrite is blocked on that feature.

Upd 1: Possible solution - use esm package as transformer? Doesn't work well with jest :(

Upd 2: Tried using babel-jest to compile modules - that doesn't work because import.meta is not compiled (for some reason), so you can't have 100% compatible code. Seems like waiting for jest ES compat is the best way?

Upd 3: jest just added basic unstable ESM support. gotta give it a shot.

Upd 4: And it works! 🥳

[yamalight]

I wanted to use Ink for new cli, but it seems like it also has issues with ES modules support (import-jsx package specifically). So CLI is also blocked 🙃

Possible solution - use esm package? - doesn't work because import-jsx uses require to load modules, while esm expects import for all ES modules.

Update: Managed to make it work using htm package! 🎉🥳

Update 2: Not sure I like how the resulting code with html tagged template looks. Lack of syntax highlighting makes it quite hard to read 🤔

Update 3: Tried to use swc and esbuild to transpile jsx. both don't seem to play well with ESM (at least from the first basic attempt)

Update 4: Found a bug in swc, send a PR to fix it. This might fix most of issues(?)

Update 5: Using @babel/preset-env with custom config that emits ESM seems to work for now! Migrating to swc/esbuild would be nice for build speed, but for now it's fine.

Update 6: came to a conclusion that React/Ink is waaaay to complex for what exoframe CLI does. Dropped it. Tried using enquirer instead - it has some nice features, but some of the things are not quite what we need here. Seems like sticking with inquirer and building a custom prompt for config might be the best / easiest way to go 🤔

[yamalight]

Great collection of CLI websites on HN, ones I like most:

• Poetry.py
• Starship.rs
• Github CLI
• Httpie
• Tldr pages

Frameworks for docs that looks nice:

• Starlight
• nextra

[yamalight]

Alright, few months later - doesn't seem like native ESM support in Node.js ecosystem is going to happen anytime soon. Will probably scrap the plan to use pure ESM and use babel (with e.g. rollup) to compile to cjs.
Well, was worth a try I guess 🙃

[yamalight]

Initial server rewrite to ESM is finished 🎉

Things to keep in mind:

• Current implementation uses --experimental-json-modules to import JSON (can be easily refactored)
• Tests require --experimental-vm-modules flag (shouldn't pose a problem)
• I haven't tried compiling ESM code with ncc yet

[yamalight]

I'm starting to think it might be easier to rewrite whole thing to typescript at this stage. So many tools are still not quite there yet with ESM support. The pain 🙃

[FDiskas]

Yes please 😊

[yamalight]

I've tried doing that yesterday and as just a solution to ESM issues - it's no longer viable. There already are ESM-only modules that won't work in CJS envs, so you have to compile ts to ESM. Which just means you have ts on top of all existing issues 😅

[FDiskas]

I can try to make my hands dirty 😉

[yamalight]

@FDiskas I'd prefer to first finish ESM version and then do anything else. There's too many issues as it is to add yet another thing on top 😅