Webpack 5 support

[mhauens]

As preact-cli is still using webpack@4.46.0, ist there a plan to upgrade to latest webpack 5 version?

[rschristian]

As far as I know there is no current plan in motion for doing so, no. It'd certainly be a nice-to-have, but there's at least a few dependencies that need some work / reevaluation and are holding us back from updating as they're not compatible. And that's not taking into account the work needed to make that upgrade happen, or if anyone is willing to do it.

Most active development is over on WMR at the moment.

[adroitwhiz]

Webpack v4 is broken on Node 17 and up with no plans to fix it (webpack/webpack#14532), so if preact-cli is in fact unmaintained and there's no work being put into upgrading to Webpack 5, an official deprecation notice would be nice.

[rschristian]

Preact-CLI isn't necessarily unmaintained, as you can see via the commit history, work has been done recently. But keeping up with the rapidly changing Webpack ecosystem is extremely time consuming on the small group of volunteer maintainers (see preactjs/wmr#867 (comment) for some great context)

I don't think anyone is ready to deprecate yet (or I haven't heard anything at least) but community contributions are certainly always welcome. If anyone has some experience or wants to put together a PR, I'm sure people would be happy to review.

I believe I had a WIP sitting around, so I might be able to take a look at it over the coming week.

Appreciate the heads-up on that Webpack issue! Good to know that might be a problem.

[ForsakenHarmony]

Webpack v4 is broken on Node 17 and up with no plans to fix it (webpack/webpack#14532), so if preact-cli is in fact unmaintained and there's no work being put into upgrading to Webpack 5, an official deprecation notice would be nice.

As long as it works with Node 16 I don't see any reason to do so right now, Node 17 is "Current" and will never be LTS. ("Production applications should only use Active LTS or Maintenance LTS releases.").

With Node 18 however, things might change, and it would suck if we can't support it.

[FrantzUml]

Sure preact-cli is obsolete with many dependencies package deprecated (webpack, jest, html-webpack-plugin, chokidar, even preact itself, and so on).
For example, using preact-router@3.0.1 instead of @4.1.0 makes error as vnode.attributes is replaced by vnode.props, and so on.

[rschristian]

@FrantzUml You're confusing "deprecated" with "older versions". Few packages actually are deprecated, none with actual issues from that deprecation. Usually just maintainers giving a nudge to upgrade, which is totally fair (but not viable at this time for us).

For example, using preact-router@3.0.1 instead of @4.1.0

preact-cli doesn't rely on preact-router at all. That's something entirely in users' own applications (which you can replace with any router, I might add). That's your dependency, you're free to upgrade it if you want.

[FrantzUml]

Sorry but not confusing at all : make an npm audit once installed and you'll see 68 packages with high level security.
Concerning preact-router, the package.json for preact-cli indicates "preact-router": "^3.0.1" : no updates for package.json means obsolete for me.

[rschristian]

make an npm audit once installed and you'll see 68 packages with high level security.

npm audit is one of the most horribly flawed pieces of software out there. You can't rely on it, as it has no concept of dev vs prod dependencies. None of those "vulnerabilities" are actual problems.

Here's some great reading on why npm audit is totally junk, if you want to learn more: https://overreacted.io/npm-audit-broken-by-design/

Concerning preact-router, the package.json for preact-cli

Again, preact-cli doesn't have a dependency on preact-router. It's your package.json. You can do with it as you please.

Upgrade the version, swap it out for something else, remove client-side routing altogether; it's your prerogative. CLI is not opinionated when it comes to routing.

no updates for package.json means obsolete for me.

Refusal to update your own package file if you want something different (like a newer version of preact-router) doesn't make the package obsolete.

Please try to be constructive in the future. You're not adding value here.

[rschristian]

Bit of a status update for any who are curious: v4 is coming along, hopefully to be published in the next couple of months.

If anyone is interested in trying out a prerelease version and providing feedback, it can be installed by executing the following:

$ [npm install / yarn add] https://gitpkg.now.sh/preactjs/preact-cli/packages/cli\?next

An unrefined set of changelogs can be found here: https://github.com/preactjs/preact-cli/tree/next/.changeset

Let me know if there's any comments, concerns, issues, etc.

Thanks!

[niknah]

https://gitpkg.now.sh/preactjs/preact-cli/packages/cli\?next` is serving blank pages for me.

I'm using the default project created from...
npx preact-cli create default my-project