SmartES
Ingenious server for native ES projects
Nowhere near a beta.
Traditional way of deploying JS websites (apps/pwa/spa) typically bundles all files together into a single JS file. This is inefficient as everything has to be downloaded again, even if only a single line of code was changed. It slows down the website and incurrs unnecessary data costs.
The SmartES approach is vastly different. Each file is versioned and servered independently. Each versioned file is immutable. This means caching optimizations can be done to eliminate fetching a file more than once.
SmartES uses Git directly to track file history, and also have support for hosting many tracking points of Git in parallel.
Key points
- Built for production, but is encouraged to be used as a dev-server as well (use special branch ':')
- Committed files have a 1 year client-side hard cache. Each deployed file is immutable and safe to cache forever.
- Use regex to determine what branches should be deployed
- Uncommited changes, unstaged or staged, are given an etag
Word of advice
Using SmartES, make sure no one ever force-pushes to Git
Because dependencies are calculated based on the Git history, if the history were to change that could result in inconsistent states.
Install
npm install -g mikabytes/smartes
Example usage
Create a configuration file smartes.js in the base directory of your Git repository (can be bare), then run the command: smartes
Serve everything (including git hashes, tags, branches)
entry: './index.js' branches: /.*/ port: 3000 // The file ./index.js will be available at http://localhost:3000/[tag/hash/branch]/index.jsChange base folder
entry: './index.js' base: './src' port: 3000 branches: /.*/ // The file ./src/index.js will be available at http://localhost:3000/[tag/hash/branch]/index.jsServe the master branch, with start.js as entry point
entry: './start.js' base: './' port: 3000 branches: /master/ // http://localhost:3000/master/start.jsServe any branch starting with the word "release"
entry: './start.js' port: 3000 branches: /release.*/ // http://localhost:3000/releaseInitial/start.js// http://localhost:3000/release20200202/start.js// etc.Extracting file location information
SmartES provides an endpoint "smartes.js" which provides a manifest. This can be especially useful if you have some external projects that need to import a subpart of the JS application.
curl http://localhost:3000/someBranch/smartes.js
{
"entry": "./index.js",
"files": {
"./index.js": {
"version": 1,
"githash": "8cc6a",
"dependencies": {
"./pages/redux-saga/effects.js": 1
},
"url": "./index-1.js"
}
}
Working locally
If HEAD is specified as branch, then SmartES turns off all caching headers. This is only meant to be used for developing locally, and only works if the repository is not bare.
curl http://localhost:3000/:/index.js
# fetches index.js from foo branch
Also, detection of unstaged and staged changes is enabled. Such files will be served directly from the hard-drive as-is.
Importing assets and having an index file as entry
If SmartES seens the phrase smartes(...) anywhere in a file, it will replace the ... string with the appropriate file location everywhere. This enables the use of assets, and also to have an HTML file as entry point:
<!-- smartes(./index.js) -->Let's say the version of index.js is 9, then SmartES will rewrite this file as:
<!-- smartes(./index-9.js) -->Roadmap
Planned upcoming features are:
- Enable HTTP/2 support with excellent PUSH support.