Migration guide missing: bevy_ui feature no longer includes rendering in 0.17

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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
1-3 hours
Newbie friendliness
62/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
rust
Domain
documentation

Research direction

Start with the 0.16 to 0.17 migration guide linked in the issue and review its feature-migration sections. Add the note that bevy_ui no longer implies bevy_ui_render for users with default-features = false, including the required feature example; the guide is done when this silent UI-rendering break is documented.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

A-Migration Guides C-Correction S-Needs-Design

Originally by @bigmark222 in https://github.com/bevyengine/bevy/issues/22524

Summary

The 0.16 to 0.17 migration guide does not mention that the bevy_ui feature no longer implies rendering functionality. Users who set default-features = false and explicitly list features will have UI that spawns without errors but renders nothing.

The Problem

When migrating to Bevy 0.17 with custom features like:

bevy = { version = "0.17", default-features = false, features = ["bevy_ui", "bevy_text", ...] }

UI entities spawn correctly (logs confirm setup runs), but nothing appears on screen. There are no errors or warnings - the UI is simply invisible.

The Solution

Add bevy_ui_render to the feature list:

bevy = { version = "0.17", default-features = false, features = ["bevy_ui", "bevy_ui_render", "bevy_text", ...] }

Request

Please add this to the 0.16 to 0.17 migration guide under a section like "UI Rendering Feature Separation":

If you use default-features = false with explicit feature flags, note that bevy_ui no longer implies rendering. You must also enable bevy_ui_render for UI elements to be visible.

Related

This was previously reported in #21093 but the migration guide was never updated. That issue is the only place this information exists, making it very difficult to discover.

Impact

This is a silent breaking change - code compiles, runs without errors, but produces incorrect output. These are the hardest bugs to diagnose. We spent several hours debugging this before finding #21093 via web search.

Dominant language
JavaScript
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Merged PRs (30d)
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