JSON Schema for the manifests

[nhedger]

Hey 👋,

Unless I'm mistaken, no JSON schema exists for the manifests generated by Vite. I think it would be interesting to create them to allow external tools to validate manifests against them.

What do you guys think ? I'd be willing to get the ball rolling and drafting a proposal.

Use case

I'm working on a PHP library for parsing Vite manifests to help with backend integration. It would be nice to be able to validate the manifest prior to parsing it.

[patak-dev]

@brillout @ElMassimo this may interest you. I think it would be a good addition if they don't exist in some form already

[nhedger]

Thanks for the feedback. I've started drafting this in #7960.

[ElMassimo]

Thanks for the ping @patak-dev!

I like the idea of having a JSON schema. When I did the initial implementation for Vite Ruby, Vite was still in beta and the format was very different.

Now that the format has stabilized, it's important to validate it to ensure backwards compatibility, or even as a way to document breaking changes in Vite 3 (if any).

[brillout]

Would an alternative be to maintain a manifest version? This is common for manifest files.

That way we can signal backwards compatibility and document breaking changes.

(vite-plugin-ssr enforces the user to rebuild the app if the Vite version changed, so there is no need for something like this for vite-plugin-ssr.)

[ElMassimo]

In Vite Ruby, the app will be rebuilt if any of the dependencies in package.json change (such as Vite).

It does seem like a good idea to add one in the next breaking change, but for now the structure of the JSON file doesn't lend itself to that. version is a valid entry name at the moment (could be used in a virtual entrypoint).

I see the schema as a practical way to track changes though, and make it easier for the ecosystem to adapt to future changes, as well as to prevent bugs that affect how the manifest is built.