Follow-up to issue: SSR: Add a way to configure externalDependencies for the server bundle only

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
typescript
Domain
build-system

Research direction

Start from the application-builder option definitions where externalDependencies is declared (schema and option resolution under packages/angular/build), then locate where the server and browser esbuild configurations diverge. Note the report that dev builds and prod builds are configured differently — both paths must apply the new option. Done looks like a server-only externalization option that is accepted, applied only to the server bundle (e.g. graphql external on server, bundled in browser), and verified with an SSR build; API naming needs maintainer sign-off first.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

area: @angular/build
Command

build

Description

As title says, I'd like to follow-up on the unfortunately closed issue https://github.com/angular/angular-cli/issues/26487, requesting to configure externalDependencies independently for server and browser bundle.

Reading the mentioned issue, it has been closed because no particular value has been seen in being able to configure externalDependencies independently. However I'd like to point to a realistic and important case where such an option will be crucial.

Right now, we're still on using Webpack, which allows configuring externalDependencies explicitly for the server bundle, and that's the reason why it's not blocking us yet. But there's plans to eventually migrate to application-builder, however still a lot of obstacles ned to be solved, as like the mentioned lack of being able to define externalDependencies for server bundle only.

Our case is, we're using DataDog dd-trace for monitoring our server app infrastructure. dd-trace is being injected on runtime and requires all node packages doing downstream requests being external as otherwise it cannot properly trace them. See https://docs.datadoghq.com/tracing/trace_collection/dd_libraries/nodejs/#bundling

In our particular scenario, this applies to graphql package. We had to externalize it, as otherwise we wouldn't get logs for all requests towards our GraphQL API on server-side. But on the client-side using the browser-bundle we do not want graphql package being external, as there's absolutely no reason in it.

So, our particular needs can be properly served by using Webpack builder but with the current options for application-builder this isn't possible.

As a workaround I tried to implement a custom Esbuild plugin, which should reset the external dependencies just for the browser build. But due to the Angular build architecture this only works for a prod build but not for a development build. So I eventually dropped this idea, which anyway doesn't seem clean.

Hence I'd highly appreciate if you could change your mind in considering separate externalDependencies configurations for server and browser build.

Describe the solution you'd like

Being able to configure externalDependencies separately for server and browser build.

Describe alternatives you've considered

No response

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