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moon v1.7 - Next-generation configuration and errors

· 3 min read
Miles Johnson
Miles Johnson
Founder, developer

With this release, we've rewritten configuration from the ground up, improved error messages, and started work on diagnostics!

Configuration rewrite​

If you've ever written Rust before, you may be familiar with the state of configuration crates in the ecosystem. There's only 2 viable choices to choose from, and we've been using 1 of them. However, it's been a constant source of friction for our use cases, and didn't support features that we've needed (built-in validation, file extending, and more).

After researching our options, and attempting to contribute upstream, we decided to build our own configuration solution, unique to moonrepo's projects. As such, we're excited to announce schematic, the most powerful configuration crate in the Rust ecosystem, with built-in features like:

  • Strict parsing with serde (serilization, deserialization).
  • Code frames in errors (when applicable).
  • Source file/URL extending.
  • Partial file parsing and merging.
  • Field-level merge strategies.
  • Recursive validation.
  • Dynamic default and env var values.
  • And much more!

We've spent the last few weeks building this crate from the ground up, and migrating the moon codebase to it. It's been quite a feat, but we're very excited for what it has to offer already, and what's to come!

Strict parsing​

When we fail to parse a configuration file, we now include a descriptive message of the failure, and the file that failed to parse. Typically this will be for unknown fields and invalid value types.

We hope this bubbles up typos and incorrectly nested settings!

Recursive validation​

Previously when validation would fail, we'd return on the first error and ignore subsequent errors. This is a non-ideal experience as you'd have to constantly run moon commands until all validation issues have been resolved.

Now we aggregate all validation errors, even from deeply nested fields, and present them together.

What's next?​

Since schematic is very young, and it hasn't been tested heavily in the ecosystem, we expect bugs and weird edge cases to popup. If you encounter any issues, please report them immediately so that we can fix them as soon as possible!

With that being said, we'll continue to improve parsing, error messages, and unique functionality, like code frames within errors. Here's an example for a basic JSON file.

Better errors​

You may have noticed the errors in the screenshots above look quite different than what we've rendered until now, and you are correct. Going forward, all errors will be rendered by the wonderful Rust crate, miette.

We've introduced this crate to handle all errors and diagnostics within moon, not just configuration. So expect a much better developer experience moving forward!

Other changes​

View the official release for a full list of changes.

  • Added support for npm lockfile v3 format.