Vue-Config

Purpose

This library is a replacement for several common Vue npm packages. The library is loaded in on all pages on our portals and pages of UniversityAdmin that contain one or more Vue microservices, which means that any Vue microservice on our portals and UniversityAdmin can rely on these packages being there. This way we avoid the duplication of every microservice loading in the same NPM packages.

The library contains only core Vue dependencies (so for instance no vue-class-component). At this moment, the library includes:

• vue
• vue-router

Usage

First uninstall all dependencies which this package provides:

npm uninstall vue vue-router

Then we simply replace these by this library:

Webpack 5:

npm install @studyportals/vue-config

Webpack 4:

npm install @studyportals/vue-config@^3.0.0

Webpack 3:

npm install @studyportals/vue-config@^1.2.1

Under the purpose section, the benefit was mentioned of not having to load in the same dependencies multiple times. So, webpack needs to take care of excluding vue-config-related packages when building your project. If you are using vue-config for a microservice that is deployed using the webpack-helper package, no extra webpack configuration is needed for this to be taken care of. Otherwise, you'll need to add the following plugin to your webpack configuration (for example in webpack.base.conf.js):

plugins: [
    new webpack.DllReferencePlugin({
        manifest: require("@studyportals/vue-config/dist/vue3_library.json")
    })
],

or for prior vue-config versions (v3 or lower) that support vue 2:

plugins: [
    new webpack.DllReferencePlugin({
        manifest: require("@studyportals/vue-config/dist/library.json")
    })
],

There is nothing more to do. Your Vue application will now use the packages provided by this package. Once the dependencies are found, and resolved, they will be excluded from your bundle. Your bundle file should now be significantly smaller!

Custom build steps

• Custom module ids plugin . This self-made plugin set custom module ids for vue and vue-router. We have gone for a self-made plugin as the default plugins do not generate the same module ids for a production and development bundle. This makes a production code dll manifest incompatible with the development dll manifest

• Append to bundle plugin This self-made plugin makes it possible to append a small piece of code to the end of a bundle. We use this to add the following piece of code:

if (typeof module !== 'undefined'){
    module.exports = vue3_library
}

This code exports the vue3_library, so it can be imported in unit tests. This is necessary as some packages are built with this dll dependency. If it's not loaded all unit tests importing this package will fail. By exporting it we can load vue3_library within the unit test setup phase.

Common issues

Place of webpack configuration in folder structure

The vue3_library.json file that is referenced relies on a certain folder structure to find its dependencies and exclude them from the main application file that it builds. It is recommended to configure webpack with the @studyportals/webpack-helper package so that this process is simplified and less error-prone.

Aliases

It is possible that your webpack configuration contains aliases, like so:

resolve: {
    alias: {
        'vue$': 'vue/dist/vue.esm.js'
    }
}

This might break the codesplitting and so far the working solution has been to simply remove the alias.

no-extraneous-dependencies

Since we now load in this library as a dependency we no longer have Vuex as a direct dependency in our package.json file. If your Eslint has the 'no-extraneous-dependencies' rule configured it will no longer let you build your project :(. The only solution we found until now is to turn off the rule by using the following setting:

'import/no-extraneous-dependencies': 0,

"But my application requires a package to run on a different version"

In that case, that specific package can be updated, but you first need to align with all the other teams that have a Vue application to re-deploy once the version is changed, to avoid any conflicts between applications that depend on the same vue-config-based library file.

How do I run my application standalone?

Open your main index.html file and include the pre-build library.

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@studyportals/[email protected]/dist/vue3_library.min.js"></script>

Production version

You can also include the non minified version (which enables the Vue debugger). This is totally fine as long as you make sure that the non minified version will never be embedded in production. You shouldn't even try to embed the library file on our portals since it is already loaded through the CDN so you should be fine ;-)

<script type="text/javascript" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/npm/@studyportals/[email protected]/dist/vue3_library.js"></script>

Development version

The vue-config library is by default loaded on every page. Loading this library multiple times will cause the page to break. It is therefore important to exclude them! There are several ways to embed your resources on our portals. Most of them boil down to parsing the DOM, extracting the javascript and stylesheets and injecting them on the page.

How does it work?

This package is created with the DLLPlugin. A manifest is created on the side, which is used by the DllReferencePlugin to map dependencies.