Potentially removing brunch from the Phoenix new template generator

[regal]

webpack 4 (still in alpha) is moving towards a zero config default, some details here: https://www.valentinog.com/blog/webpack-4-tutorial/

[peerreynders]

The question is whether Webpack is simply a solution that just changes the problem.

• 2013-12-19 Webpack 1 beta 2
• 2014-02-19 Webpack 1
• 2015-11-01 Webpack 2 beta
• 2017-01-17 Webpack 2.2
• 2017-06-19 Webpack 3
• 2017-12-04 Webpack 4 alpha

Lately the major versions just seem to be chasing one another. So would

“When will Phoenix distribute with Webpack?”

simply be traded for

“When will Phoenix update the (major) version of Webpack it comes with?”

[OvermindDL1]

@danschultzer

Ok, so it seems like the brunch project is dead at this point?

Many of their libraries (at least the ones we’re using) are not maintained at all, with few or no releases over the last half year, and it’s especially evident in the last 3 months.

E.g., on our production app, we’re using sass. To get that working we’ve had to pull the master branch to get it to compile. This is an issue everybody will experience if they use recent nodejs version, but there has been no release for a year.

I feel that a simple build tool with NPM scripts would be far the best solution for Phoenix. But at least switching to a well-maintained library like webpack would be much better. Brunch has been a painful experience for us, and I don’t think Phoenix should default new users to it.

This post right here worries me… I’m even more certain brunch should be removed now…

[richjdsmith]

@danschultzer

Brunch has been a painful experience for us

Ditto.

After looking at Brunch’s twitter account along with the GitHub repo as well as a few brunch packages, it does indeed look like it’s dying or dead.

I can honestly say, I never really appreciated Rails Asset pipeline until I started mucking around with JS build systems. I have a preference for gulp - and havn’t even tried webpack- but know I hate brunch.

[baldmountain]

Rather than just discussing this I thought I’d contribute some code. This: https://github.com/phoenixframework/phoenix/pull/2740 is a pull request to make the default use npm scripts rather than brunch. I only kind of know what I’m doing when it comes to JavaScript/CSS build pipelines but this PR seems to generate a working project with watching JS and CSS supported. (I think the JS pipeline is OK, but don’t think CSS pipeline is correct.)

[richjdsmith]

@baldmountain Sucks it got shutdown so quickly without much discussion

I pinged the Brunch dev team to see if it is still being actively developed. @paulmillr (one of the devs) replied that dependencies are still being maintained. I did not recieve confirmation that the project is still actively being developed, :shrug:

@brunch Is this project still actively maintained? Or has it been back-burner'd?

/cc @paulmillr & @ElanShanker

— Rich Smith (@RichJDSmith) February 4, 2018

[baldmountain]

@richjdsmith I’m OK with it being shut down. For learning Phoenix, or just getting started, brunch is just fine and continues to work.

Developers who are going to build a React, Angular, Vue.js (or some other JS framework) app are going to know more about JS build pipelines and are going to replace bunch as part of starting up a project. So brunch is still fine by me.

But I do think it is something that will need to be replaced at some point. There’s just no rush to do it now.

[richjdsmith]

@baldmountain

I do think it is something that will need to be replaced at some point. There’s just no rush to do it now.

Perfectly reasonable attitude. I agree completely. I’d just like to see there be a discussion before jumping on board The Next Great Build Tool/Task Runner™

Ruby on Rails was super opinionated and that could sometimes be a massive PITA, but I still miss the Asset Pipeline.

[sync08]

Replace brunch with webpack 4 in the installers