The latest Phoenix release ditches webpack and npm for esbuild and… nothing?

Of course, these are just the defaults — docs for Elixir’s esbuild clearly state that NPM is still supported and you can always pass --no-assets and do things 100% your way. But it’s easy to underestimate the power of defaults, especially those that cover area outside of target audience’s expertise — which is the case of Phoenix devs and JS bundlers.

In this post, the author lays out how they stitched together an esbuild + npm setup that will likely scale alongside the frontend of your application. I will surely be trying this setup on our app over the next few weeks and might even video it if you’re interested in going along for the ride.