spfx project upgrade, suggestion for upgrading SPFx fast serve package

[Jwaegebaert]

When an SPFx project makes use of SPFx Fast Serve. Suggesting that the package helper of this should be upgraded to the same version. I personally use this a lot and recently came across this when upgrading to version 1.14.

e.g. package.json dev dependency needed to be upgraded to the following

"devDependencies": {
  "spfx-fast-serve-helpers": "^1.14.0"
}

[garrytrinder]

Nice suggestion @Jwaegebaert 👍🏻

Maybe we should consider how we report on dependencies you may have in your project that are not part of the core SPFx dependencies, even if that is to provide a messages of what we do and don’t check when we build the upgrade report.

Any thoughts @pnp/cli-for-microsoft-365-maintainers ?

[waldekmastykarz]

@s-KaiNet if we wanted to include SPFx Fast Serve in our SPFx project upgrade guidance, what would be the best way to go about it? What's the first version of SPFx that you're supporting? Do you have a version matrix of how SPFx Fast Serve versions match SPFx versions that we could use?

Another thing that I realized we'd need to consider is the time between release of SPFx and release of the matching version of SPFx Fast Serve. It's possible that they're out of sync (just as our support is typically a day or two off) because they're built independently. I'd suggest that we'd release SPFx upgrade as soon as we can and can then extend it with SPFx Fast Serve guidance as soon as the matching version is available, rather than holding of SPFx upgrade guidance until all dependencies have been upgraded. Often we see people use the latest version of CLI for Microsoft 365 to upgrade their projects, but following this pattern, if you want to get the guidance on SPFx Fast Serve, you'd need to use the latest preview version or wait until the next full release of CLI. Would that be practical?

[Jwaegebaert]

That's a good observation. It is indeed a good idea to make the upgrade capability immediately accessible and then later give the SPFx Fast Serve suggestions when updated.

[s-KaiNet]

I don't have a versions matrix for fast-serve and SPFx, but I will prepare it. The best way would be just giving the guidance based on the matrix and the target SPFx version. Starting from SPFx 1.12 it's just a one-to-one match between SPFx version and fast-serve, meaning fast-serve@1.12.x for SPFx 1.12, etc.
I also have a day or two days of gap between releasing SPFx and matching fast-serve version. In some cases in might be even more, for example, if the final SPFx version contains some breaking changes which I was not able to fix quickly due to lack of time or other circumstances.

@Jwaegebaert just a small comment, in your original example you should use tilde ~ version, not caret ^, otherwise in the future it might lead to installing fast-serve@1.15 for your 1.14 SPFx, which will be a mistake. Correct:

"spfx-fast-serve-helpers": "~1.14.0"

[s-KaiNet]

This is the matrix. Please tell me if we need anything else.

[waldekmastykarz]

This helps! Thank you so much!