updating ember cli addons for fastboot 1.0

big balls of mud killer
, in 29 August 2017

There are some incompatible changes in Fastboot’s 1.0 release.

Pre 1.0 you may have checked the environment variable to check if your app was running in fastboot, and disable importing some libraries if so. This will no longer work in Fastboot 1.0. @kratiahuja has written up a great upgrade guide for addons that used the old API. https://gist.github.com/kratiahuja/d22de0fb1660cf0ef58f07a6bcbf1a1c

Basically you can use this check instead of checking the environment variable.

if typeof Fastboot === 'undefined'

Personally I found the fastboot-transform library (also created by @kratiahuja) to be more convenient. You simply pipe files to the fastbootTransform function and if fastboot is running they will be replaced with an empty string instead of the javascript.

For example here is the index.js file from the ember-fullcalendar addon, to exclude the vendored js files from being included in the fastboot build.

/* eslint-env node */
'use strict';
const fastbootTransform = require('fastboot-transform');

module.exports = {
  name: 'ember-fullcalendar',

  // isDevelopingAddon: function() {
  //   return true;
  // },

  options: {
    nodeAssets: {
      'fullcalendar': {
        import: {
          include: ['dist/fullcalendar.js', 'dist/fullcalendar.css'],
          processTree(input) {
            return fastbootTransform(input);
          }
        }
      }

If you are having trouble figuring out exactly how to upgrade your addon, there is an issue that has compiled all the addons that need to be upgraded to work with fastboot 1.0, and there are links to the PRs with the changes needed to upgrade. These can be great for example code.

https://github.com/ember-fastboot/ember-cli-fastboot/issues/387

I have issued a few pull requests myself to some of the addons I am using.

what about ember-cli-build.js ?

The Fastboot variable is not available in ember-cli-build.js.

I don’t really want to create ember-cli addons for everything I need to protect fastboot from trying to run, so for now the best solution is to create an in-repo addon.

@kratiahuja has another great example we can use for this. https://github.com/kratiahuja/sample-in-repo-fastboot/commit/8874fe35575ddfa8d3f63dd9b3b7e65aa2b7dc68

Feel free to check out my own ember app datafruits to see how I personally handled the upgrade.

ember-network deprecated in favor of ember-fetch

Another issue I ran into, you are supposed to use ember-fetch instead of ember-network now. This wasn’t too hard to fix.

Instead of

import fetch from 'ember-network/fetch';

you can use:

import fetch from 'fetch';

And you can remove ember-network from your package.json.

By the way shoutout to @kratiahuja for all her hard work on this!

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