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Merge pull request #27079 from backstage/rugvip/docs

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docs/tooling: update backend dev bundling docs
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Patrik Oldsberg
2024-10-11 12:10:31 +02:00
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docs/tooling/cli/02-build-system.md
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@@ -364,22 +364,19 @@ load performance.
### Backend Development
The backend development bundling is also based on Webpack, but rather than
starting up a web server, the backend is started up using the
[`RunScriptWebpackPlugin`](https://www.npmjs.com/package/run-script-webpack-plugin).
The reason for using Webpack for development of the backend is both that it is a
convenient way to handle transpilation of a large set of packages, as well us
allowing us to use hot module replacement and maintaining state while reloading
individual backend modules. This is particularly useful when running the backend
with in-memory SQLite as the database choice.
The backend development setup does not use any bundling process. It runs a
Node.js process directly, with on-the-fly transpilation from TypeScript to
JavaScript. The transpilation is done with a custom transform based on
[SWC](https://swc.rs/).
Except for executing in Node.js rather than a web server, the backend
development bundling configuration is quite similar to the frontend one. It
shares most of the Webpack configuration, including the transpilation setup.
Some differences are that it does not inject any environment variables or node
module fallbacks, and it uses
[`webpack-node-externals`](https://www.npmjs.com/package/webpack-node-externals)
to avoid bundling in dependency modules.
During development the backend Node.js process will restart whenever there is a
change to the source code. This means that any in-memory data will be lost. In
order to store data between restarts, the backend process has an IPC channel
available to store and restore data from the parent CLI process. The primary
purpose of this, which is already built-in, is to restore the contents of
databases when using SQLite for development. You can also use it for your own
purposes, with the `DevDataStore` utility exported from the
`@backstage/backend-dev-utils` package.
If you want to inspect the running Node.js process, the `--inspect` and
`--inspect-brk` flags can be used, as they will be passed through as options to