This is a POC on micro-frontends for learning purposes.
This project is dockerized, so all you need to run it is:
make build runThis will build the docker images and start the containers.
After some research, I've choosen Single Spa as the micro-frontends framework. It's possible to not use any framework, just as it's possible to develop frontend applications without React/Vue/etc, but it increases complexity.
From the available frameworks, I picked this one due to the availability of documentation, other frameworks seemed scarce, and this framework also seemed to follow a pattern that I could easily wrap my head around.
Following the pattern in this repo, we can deploy our micro-frontends into a CDN, keeping the
last N versions, and in case there's a bad deploy we can rollbacks using the import-map-deployer,
with a simple PATCH to it's API we can point the deployed root app to an older version (as long
as it's still on the CDN or exposed) and the rollback will take effect as soon as the user refresh
the page.
Instead of the developer having to spin up the full environment, handling authentication issues, manually editing cookies, all they would have to do is spin up their micro-frontend, open the test/staging instance, enable the devtools and override their application with the local version. They wouldn't even have to worry about running other micro-frontends as they can use the version running on the environment.
There are some smaller issues that I need to investigate:
When running locally the pages seems to do random refreshes, it's not a major issue but it will impact negatively on developer experience.
It seems that styled-components requires a singleton to work, so if two projects attempt to have separate instances of it, it could crash the page. I have not validated this yet, and it seems that it's possible to set a global version of it, but this would force all micro-frontends to use the same version of it.
I need to verify if there's a way to setup hot reload. It seems it should work out of the box, but maybe docker is getting in the way of it.