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Ladle v1

Vojtech Miksu
Vojtech Miksu
Developer Platform, Uber

Ladle has been out for 3 months and the community feedback was overwhelming and amazing. Thank you! Some numbers:

  • 🎯 20,000 unique visitors on this website.
  • ⭐ 1,300+ GitHub stars.
  • 🖊️ 10 contributors.
  • 💬 100+ folks joined our Discord community.

Today, it's time to graduate Ladle to its first major stable version 1. We've fixed many bugs discovered by early adopters and added some big features as well:

V1 brings the most requested feature - the full access to Vite configuration. When Ladle was released, it was intended as a tool that could replace Storybook. The bundler (Vite) was just an implementation detail and completely hidden away. However, for more advanced setups, you need to customize various aspects of compilation (like Storybook's Webpack). It makes sense to fully expose vite.config.js and embrace Vite first applications as well. Ladle's configuration has been rewritten from the ground up.

Check the new config documentation.

Breaking Changes​

  • Ladle now loads top-level vite.config.js/ts/mjs and uses all its options.
  • All Vite related options from config.mjs are removed and an error will be thrown, use vite.config.js instead.
  • enableFlow option removed, you can create your own plugin (check our e2e/flow test).
  • Programmatic API imports changed to @ladle/react/serve and @ladle/react/build.
  • --out renamed to --outDir to mimic Vite configuration, added -o alias, outDir moved to the top-level in config.mjs.
  • --port has an alias -p, port moved to the top-level in config.mjs.
  • vite.config.js can be customized through viteConfig and --viteConfig.
  • --base-url removed, use base in vite.config.js.
  • --open removed, use server.open in vite.config.js.
  • --sourcemap removed, use build.sourcemap in vite.config.js.

This makes our internal setup much simpler since we don't need to pass through individual Vite settings - you can now customize all of them without Ladle being in your way.

Next big features?​

We are adding MDX support and making it easier to use Ladle for documentation.