Module Federation Universal (Vite, Rollup, Turbopack, Native, esBuild)

[viktoriialurie]

Short Description

Being able to combine containers generated by different build systems.

Longer Description

Module Federation is about helping teams to ship code faster, and more reliably and to organize the development effort around multiple, autonomous teams. Module Federation Universal takes it to the next stage by allowing aspects of the application to be brought together and decoupled from their individual build toolsets. There is also an emphasis on using native APIs as well to create a standards-based approach.

Business Value

As companies make acquisitions or teams experiment with different technologies it is important to be able to incorporate the artifacts of those teams into the overall stack as quickly as possible. Through leveraging, Module Federation and its decoupling from build system teams will have more flexibility and lower times to cohesion.

Acceptance Criteria

• Decouple MF from Webpack 5
• Common interface OR as adapter OR Webpack MF upgrade
• A lot of samples and e2e will be required

[zackarychapple]

Did some research on existing efforts:

Vite

• https://github.com/module-federation/vite by @gioboa
• https://github.com/originjs/vite-plugin-federation by @ruleeeer and @flyfishzy

esBuild

• https://github.com/slawekkolodziej/esbuild-module-federation-plugin by @slawekkolodziej
• https://github.com/jacob-ebey/esbuild-federation-example by @jacob-ebey
• https://github.com/jacob-ebey/esbuild-federation-share-scope by @jacob-ebey
• https://github.com/hendriknielaender/module-federation by @hendriknielaender

Native Federation

• https://github.com/manfredsteyer/native-federation-core-microfrontend usage only by @manfredsteyer

[OlegLustenko]

It's already covered more or less here: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@softarc/native-federation
The goal of this native federation is to be build-free and framework-free.
So if there is a business need for this, and we can consider outsourcing the final solution, it will be a perfect match.

But I believe we need to see what turbopack will bring to us

cc: @manfredsteyer, @ScriptedAlchemy

[zackarychapple]

@OlegLustenko it would be amazing if native-federation is open sourced (and ideally moved into the Module Federation org). I believe @ScriptedAlchemy and @manfredsteyer talked about it in the past, maybe it is something that you can assist with?

Obviously Manfred and team have the final say in the decision if it is open sourced. That being said there will still be some variations that will be platform specific to add things like syntactical sugar or improvements that are only available on that platform.

[manfredsteyer]

It's already open source. Feel free to use it.

[novavi]

@manfredsteyer Thanks, this looks very neat and does seem like it solves most of the problems people could have when using module federation across different build systems. Just to be clear though, you said:

It's already open source. Feel free to use it.

... but I noticed that the packages on npm (https://www.npmjs.com/package/@softarc/native-federation, https://www.npmjs.com/package/@softarc/native-federation-runtime, https://www.npmjs.com/package/@softarc/native-federation-esbuild) don't appear to specify a license or link through to a public GitHub repo.

Unless I'm misreading this, I would imagine this would make people in many organizations wary of using it in their platforms. Is there a plan to fully open source it, or even move it into the Module Federation org?

[novavi]

@zackarychapple @OlegLustenko Just returning to this I saw the announcement in April about the release of Module Federation 2.0. Does this effectively supersede the previous suggestion above about the possibility of using native-federation?

[ilteoood]

Hi everyone, I've made the following bundler-agnostic plugin to share federated TypeScript types.
You can find the dedicated repository here: https://github.com/ilteoood/native-federation-typescript

Currently I've tested it with WebPack and Vite, but should work out of the box with esbuild and rollup.
Additionally, it could be easily adapted to work with astro and nuxt.

[zhangHongEn]

I am very happy to see that the capabilities of MF are getting stronger and stronger (Vite, Rollup, Turbopack, Native, es, ssr, ts...), it is indeed not just a micro-frontend, and I look forward to MF becoming more and more mainstream in the future.
In addition, a suggestion that is not too deep, to decouple webpack, it is time to expose the "MF runtime" module, which may increase the audience and be more flexible. Similar to findShare.js, @runtime/federation

[zhangHongEn]

module-federation-runtime

[MadaraUchiha-314]

I created the rollup plugin for module federation: https://github.com/MadaraUchiha-314/rollup-plugin-module-federation

[Muntazir86]

When using native federation, CommonJS modules pose challenges. Many npm libraries rely on CommonJS packages, which creates obstacles for migrating to native federation. Last month, I attempted to migrate an application from Webpack Module Federation to native federation to address Webpack’s slow build times. However, I couldn’t complete the migration due to unresolved runtime dependencies with date-fns-tz and ckeditor5.

It seems like there should be some solution for this.

[ScriptedAlchemy]

Native federation is not supported by our runtime or core maintainer group.

The problems you are dealing with sound similar to issues I have encountered with esbuild and federation myself.

Since we do not maintain native federation, we cannot support you with that as we do not own it.