Is this abandoned?

After spending some time to get this up and running locally, found that the only bundle created was the <theme>/balerbundles/core-bundle.js

Did some digging and found this document, which seems to imply other solutions should be used instead https://github.com/magento/baler/blob/master/docs/WHY_CUSTOM.md#how-are-folks-working-around-this-today

• hand rolling requirejs optimization config file
• magepack
• other similar options…

I just want to know for definite that this repository is not the intended way to do things.

Is that correct? Or am I missing something here?

[digiltd]

Sadly I think it has been abandoned, it has now been removed from the docs https://github.com/magento/devdocs/pull/7876

Improving performance on Magento is hard, the javascript situation is “a bit of a mess” (a very polite understated version of how I want to describe it).

Not helped by the contradicting documentation, the place where you should be able to get definitive answers on how things work is all over the place.

https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.4/performance-best-practices/advanced-js-bundling.html#magento-merging-and-bundling says:

Basic merging This command merges all synchronous JavaScript files into one file. Enabling merging without also enabling bundling is not useful because Magento uses RequireJS. If you don’t enable bundling, Magento only merges RequireJS and its configuration. When you enable both bundling and merging, Magento creates a single JavaScript file:

Sounds good. But on this page https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.4/frontend-dev-guide/themes/js-bundling.html you are told:

To configure JavaScript bundling, you must disable Javascript file merging. Bundling will not work as the merging of files excludes bundling:

Hmmm, ok but it still does say to use the minify and inbuilt bundling features. So that’s good.

Enable JavaScript bundling: Optimize bundling by minifying JavaScript files:

You are also told to minify and bundle on https://devdocs.magento.com/guides/v2.4/performance-best-practices/configuration.html#client-side-optimization-settings but futher down the page you are told:

Magento built-in mechanisms are not optimal and are shipped as fallback alternatives.

and

We do not recommend using deprecated settings like merging JS and CSS files, as they were designed only for synchronously-loaded JS in the HEAD section of the page. Using this technique can cause bundling and requireJS logic to work incorrectly.

🤦

[rossmc]

Hi @PivitParkour94

Regarding the below, magepack v2 does this, and we run it in our pipeline.

The promising feature of using baler is it determines the requirejs dependency graph using the existing code of the theme, requirejs-config.js and other *.phtml files, which means “baling” can be a part of a CI pipeline for getting a fast magento 2 frontend, until you use PWA’s which makes it all obsolete anyway.

It has to be magepack v2 to run in the pipeline, it won’t work with magepack v1.

Magepack 2 uses a custom bundler based on Baler. Check out https://youtu.be/ahxoTedqHjw.

You need v10+ of node in your CI pipeline for it to work. You still need to generate the magepack.congfig.js locally, but the bundles can be generated in the pipeline line. The magepack.config.js rarely needs to be updated.