Sourced from esbuild's releases.

v0.17.0

This release deliberately contains backwards-incompatible changes. To avoid automatically picking up releases like this, you should either be pinning the exact version of esbuild in your package.json file (recommended) or be using a version range syntax that only accepts patch upgrades such as ^0.16.0 or ~0.16.0. See npm's documentation about semver for more information.

At a high level, the breaking changes in this release fix some long-standing issues with the design of esbuild's incremental, watch, and serve APIs. This release also introduces some exciting new features such as live reloading. In detail:

• Move everything related to incremental builds to a new context API (#1037, #1606, #2280, #2418)

  This change removes the incremental and watch options as well as the serve() method, and introduces a new context() method. The context method takes the same arguments as the build() method but only validates its arguments and does not do an initial build. Instead, builds can be triggered using the rebuild(), watch(), and serve() methods on the returned context object. The new context API looks like this:

  // Create a context for incremental builds
  const context = await esbuild.context({
    entryPoints: ['app.ts'],
    bundle: true,
  })
  // Manually do an incremental build
  const result = await context.rebuild()
  // Enable watch mode
  await context.watch()
  // Enable serve mode
  await context.serve()
  // Dispose of the context
  context.dispose()

  The switch to the context API solves a major issue with the previous API which is that if the initial build fails, a promise is thrown in JavaScript which prevents you from accessing the returned result object. That prevented you from setting up long-running operations such as watch mode when the initial build contained errors. It also makes tearing down incremental builds simpler as there is now a single way to do it instead of three separate ways.

  In addition, this release also makes some subtle changes to how incremental builds work. Previously every call to rebuild() started a new build. If you weren't careful, then builds could actually overlap. This doesn't cause any problems with esbuild itself, but could potentially cause problems with plugins (esbuild doesn't even give you a way to identify which overlapping build a given plugin callback is running on). Overlapping builds also arguably aren't useful, or at least aren't useful enough to justify the confusion and complexity that they bring. With this release, there is now only ever a single active build per context. Calling rebuild() before the previous rebuild has finished now "merges" with the existing rebuild instead of starting a new build.

• Allow using watch and serve together (#805, #1650, #2576)

  Previously it was not possible to use watch mode and serve mode together. The rationale was that watch mode is one way of automatically rebuilding your project and serve mode is another (since serve mode automatically rebuilds on every request). However, people want to combine these two features to make "live reloading" where the browser automatically reloads the page when files are changed on the file system.

  This release now allows you to use these two features together. You can only call the watch() and serve() APIs once each per context, but if you call them together on the same context then esbuild will automatically rebuild both when files on the file system are changed and when the server serves a request.

• Support "live reloading" through server-sent events (#802)

  Server-sent events are a simple way to pass one-directional messages asynchronously from the server to the client. Serve mode now provides a /esbuild endpoint with an change event that triggers every time esbuild's output changes. So you can now implement simple "live reloading" (i.e. reloading the page when a file is edited and saved) like this:

  new EventSource('/esbuild').addEventListener('change', () => location.reload())

  The event payload is a JSON object with the following shape:

... (truncated)

Sourced from esbuild's changelog.

0.17.0

This release deliberately contains backwards-incompatible changes. To avoid automatically picking up releases like this, you should either be pinning the exact version of esbuild in your package.json file (recommended) or be using a version range syntax that only accepts patch upgrades such as ^0.16.0 or ~0.16.0. See npm's documentation about semver for more information.

At a high level, the breaking changes in this release fix some long-standing issues with the design of esbuild's incremental, watch, and serve APIs. This release also introduces some exciting new features such as live reloading. In detail:

• Move everything related to incremental builds to a new context API (#1037, #1606, #2280, #2418)

  This change removes the incremental and watch options as well as the serve() method, and introduces a new context() method. The context method takes the same arguments as the build() method but only validates its arguments and does not do an initial build. Instead, builds can be triggered using the rebuild(), watch(), and serve() methods on the returned context object. The new context API looks like this:

  // Create a context for incremental builds
  const context = await esbuild.context({
    entryPoints: ['app.ts'],
    bundle: true,
  })
  // Manually do an incremental build
  const result = await context.rebuild()
  // Enable watch mode
  await context.watch()
  // Enable serve mode
  await context.serve()
  // Dispose of the context
  context.dispose()

  The switch to the context API solves a major issue with the previous API which is that if the initial build fails, a promise is thrown in JavaScript which prevents you from accessing the returned result object. That prevented you from setting up long-running operations such as watch mode when the initial build contained errors. It also makes tearing down incremental builds simpler as there is now a single way to do it instead of three separate ways.

  In addition, this release also makes some subtle changes to how incremental builds work. Previously every call to rebuild() started a new build. If you weren't careful, then builds could actually overlap. This doesn't cause any problems with esbuild itself, but could potentially cause problems with plugins (esbuild doesn't even give you a way to identify which overlapping build a given plugin callback is running on). Overlapping builds also arguably aren't useful, or at least aren't useful enough to justify the confusion and complexity that they bring. With this release, there is now only ever a single active build per context. Calling rebuild() before the previous rebuild has finished now "merges" with the existing rebuild instead of starting a new build.

• Allow using watch and serve together (#805, #1650, #2576)

  Previously it was not possible to use watch mode and serve mode together. The rationale was that watch mode is one way of automatically rebuilding your project and serve mode is another (since serve mode automatically rebuilds on every request). However, people want to combine these two features to make "live reloading" where the browser automatically reloads the page when files are changed on the file system.

  This release now allows you to use these two features together. You can only call the watch() and serve() APIs once each per context, but if you call them together on the same context then esbuild will automatically rebuild both when files on the file system are changed and when the server serves a request.

• Support "live reloading" through server-sent events (#802)

  Server-sent events are a simple way to pass one-directional messages asynchronously from the server to the client. Serve mode now provides a /esbuild endpoint with an change event that triggers every time esbuild's output changes. So you can now implement simple "live reloading" (i.e. reloading the page when a file is edited and saved) like this:

  new EventSource('/esbuild').addEventListener('change', () => location.reload())

  The event payload is a JSON object with the following shape:

... (truncated)

• 2a18b3d publish 0.17.0 to npm
• 60ba46a test coverage for build merging
• 3153032 Version 0.17.0: rewrite the incremental build apis (#2816)
• 5579b0f change wordmark text
• fa27e29 fix link to go docs
• e72962f Update README.md
• 5d80704 new year new changelog
• 9cc2b84 add more info to exports errors in package.json
• See full diff in compare view

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