We built RNA to be pluggable and to be interoperable with other build systems. A lot of esbuild and postcss plugins are distribuited as standalone packages in order to be reused outside the RNA opinionated ecosystem. We also designed a micro-sdk for esbuild plugin authors that handles transform pipelines and emits chunks or files.
RNA bundler is heavily based on esbuild, an extremely fast JavaScript bundler with some pre-configured addons. It can bundle and optimize JavaScript, TypeScript, JSX, CSS and HTML and collect referenced assets just using languages features.
The bundler is designed for modern browsers, but it can transpile code for IE11 and other legacy browsers with Babel and PostCSS plugins.
Build plugins are also available for the Web Dev Server. Since both WDS and RNA aim to use standard syntax and practises in web projects, you can run a local server with hot module replacement and CSS livereload without have to bundle your web app first or to re-run a partial build for each change. Files loaded via ESM will pass through a little esbuild transpilation in order to support TypeScript, CommonJS modules and node resolution, making a great difference in developer experience. The dev server can be used also for PHP with an Encore-like approach.
npm i -D @chialab/rnapackage.json
{
"scripts": {
"start": "rna serve src --port 3000",
"build": "rna build src/index.html --output public"
}
}RNA is released under the MIT license.