Sébastien Lorber

We are happy to announce Docusaurus 3.6.

Docusaurus is now ⚡️⚡️⚡️ much faster to build your site.

Upgrading should be easy. Our release process respects Semantic Versioning. Minor versions do not include any breaking changes.

Highlights​

This release has been mostly focused on build performance through the Docusaurus Faster project.

Docusaurus Faster​

The Docusaurus Faster project's goal is to reduce the build times and memory consumption.

We have worked on multiple optimizations and modernized our infrastructure to use faster Rust-based tools, notably:

• 🦀 Rspack: Fast Rust-based web bundler, almost drop-in replacement for webpack
• 🦀 SWC: Speedy Web Compiler, Rust-based platform for the Web (HTML, CSS, JS)
• 🦀 Lightning CSS: An extremely fast CSS parser, transformer, bundler, and minifier

Impacts​

Adopting a new infrastructure can have various impacts. It's impossible to list them all exhaustively, so let's focus on the major ones.

To help you adopt it easily, we have been fairly conservative in terms of expected static site output and browser support.

Build Time​

Benchmarks on community site show that you can expect your production site to build ⚡️2 to 4 times faster! 🔥:

• React Native website: 3.04x faster 🔥
• Babel website: 3.27x faster 🔥
• Lexical website: 2x faster 🔥

How to benchmark

Memory Consumption​

You should also notice an improvement in memory consumption:

• The new infrastructure consumes less memory overall
• We fixed an important memory leak that affects in particular i18n sites
• We added CI checks to ensure that we don't regress, and that our site and init template can both build in a memory-constrained environments
• We added internal tooling to better understand which step of a build consumes memory
• We removed a process.exit(0) that can hide memory leaks in your own code and third-party plugins

Other Impacts​

• The HTML minifier now emits warnings in case of invalid HTML markup
• The static HTML output is ~5% smaller
• Some bugs are automatically fixed by the new infrastructure

Adoption Strategy​

This new infrastructure is a breaking change, but it is opt-in and does not require a new major version of Docusaurus.

Before using Docusaurus Faster, add this new package:

npm install @docusaurus/faster

yarn add @docusaurus/faster

pnpm add @docusaurus/faster

To help you adopt it incrementally under Docusaurus v3, we're introducing a set of feature flags that you can activate progressively.

We recommend turning them on all at once with this simple boolean shortcut:

const config = {
  future: {
    experimental_faster: true,
  },
};

In case one of the flags does not work for your site, it's possible to turn feature flags on independently:

const config = {
  future: {
    experimental_faster: {
      swcJsLoader: true,
      swcJsMinimizer: true,
      swcHtmlMinimizer: true,
      lightningCssMinimizer: true,
      rspackBundler: true,
      mdxCrossCompilerCache: true,
    },
  },
};

• swcJsLoader: Use SWC to transpile JS (instead of Babel)
• swcJsMinimizer: Use SWC to minify JS (instead of Terser)
• swcHtmlMinimizer : Use SWC to minify HTML and inlined JS/CSS (instead of html-minifier-terser)
• lightningCssMinimizer: Use Lightning CSS to minify CSS (instead of cssnano and clean-css)
• rspackBundler: Use Rspack to bundle your app (instead of webpack)
• mdxCrossCompilerCache: Compile MDX files once for both browser/Node.js environments instead of twice

Plugins​

The new infrastructure uses Rspack. By chance, Rspack is almost 100% compatible with webpack, and Rspack shouldn't break our plugin ecosystem.

Most Docusaurus plugins should work out of the box with Rspack, even those implementing configureWebpack.

However, some of them will require small modifications to make them compatible with Rspack. The general idea is to avoid importing webpack directly, and use the "dynamically provided" webpack instance instead:

-import webpack from 'webpack';

export default function (context, options) {
  return {
    name: 'custom-docusaurus-plugin',
-   configureWebpack(config, isServer) {
+   configureWebpack(config, isServer, {currentBundler}) {
      return {
        plugins: [
-         new webpack.DefinePlugin({}),
+         new currentBundler.instance.DefinePlugin({}),
        ]
      };
    },
  };
}

Next Steps​

It's only the beginning: we will continue working on the Docusaurus Faster project and already have a few more performance improvements planned.

Depending on your feedback, we plan to make this new infrastructure the default in an upcoming major version of Docusaurus.

🙏 We'd like to thank the authors of all these great tools that already helped us make Docusaurus much faster than before. In particular the Rspack team that supported us along the way, handled our feedback very quickly and implemented all the missing features we needed to make it happen. 👏

Rsdoctor plugin​

In #10588, we created a Docusaurus plugin for Rsdoctor. It analyzes the bundling phase of Docusaurus and helps you figure out what slows down the bundler in terms of loaders, plugins and minimizers. It works for both webpack and Rspack.

To use it, install the new @docusaurus/plugin-rsdoctor package, and then use the plugin in your config:

export default {
  plugins: [
    [
      'rsdoctor',
      {
        /* options */
      },
    ],
  ],
};

export default {
  plugins: [
    process.env.RSDOCTOR === 'true' && [
      'rsdoctor',
      {
        /* options */
      },
    ],
  ],
};

# Build without Rsdoctor
npm run build

# Build with Rsdoctor
RSDOCTOR=true npm run build

Mermaid​

In #10510, we relaxed our Mermaid diagrams dependency range to allow newer major versions of Mermaid. We now support both Mermaid 10/11, and expect upcoming versions to be compatible, letting you upgrade on your own terms.

This unlocks new types of diagrams, such as Architecture Diagrams:

Translations​

• 🇸🇮 #10551: Improve Slovenian theme translations.
• 🇻🇳 #10507: Improve Vietnamese theme translations.
• 🇪🇸 #10413: Improve Spanish theme translations.

Other changes​

Other notable changes include:

• #10586: Blog support for frontMatter.title_meta to override frontMatter.title for SEO reason.
• #10600: docusaurus build and docusaurus deploy now support multiple --locale CLI args.
• #10454: docusaurus-remark-plugin-npm2yarn upgrades to npm-to-yarn v3 and can convert npx commands.
• #10612: Canary releases will use 3.5.2-canary-<number> instead of 0.0.0-canary-<number> to respect plugins peerDependency constraints.
• #10547: @docusaurus/tsconfig upgrades to target: 'es2022'.
• #10514: Remove babel.config.js from Docusaurus init templates to discourage customizing Babel.

Check the 3.6.0 changelog entry for an exhaustive list of changes.

We are happy to announce Docusaurus 3.5.

This release contains many new exciting blog features.

Upgrading should be easy. Our release process respects Semantic Versioning. Minor versions do not include any breaking changes.

Highlights​

Blog Social Icons​

In #10222, we added the possibility to associate social links to blog authors, for inline authors declared in front matter or global through the authors.yml file.

slorber:
  name: Sébastien Lorber
  # other author properties...
  socials:
    x: sebastienlorber
    linkedin: sebastienlorber
    github: slorber
    newsletter: https://thisweekinreact.com

Icons and handle shortcuts are provided for pre-defined platforms x, linkedin, github and stackoverflow. It's possible to provide any additional platform entry (like newsletter in the example above) with a full URL.

Blog Authors Pages​

In #10216, we added the possibility for global blog authors (declared in authors.yml) to have their own dedicated page listing all the blog posts they contributed to.

This feature is opt-in and mostly relevant for multi-author blogs. You can turn it on for a specific author by setting the page: true property:

slorber:
  name: Sébastien Lorber
  # the description will be displayed on the author's page
  description: 'A freelance React and React-Native developer...'
  page: true # Turns the feature on

This creates a dedicated author page at /blog/authors/slorber.

An authors index page is also created, listing all the blog authors.

Check the blog authors pages guide for details.

Blog Feeds Styling​

In #9252, we added support for styling your blog feeds by providing custom XSLT .xls files for the RSS and Atom feeds. This allows browsers to render the feeds in a more visually appealing way, like a regular HTML page, instead of the default XML view.

const blogOptions = {
  feedOptions: {
    xslt: {
      rss: 'custom-rss.xsl',
      atom: 'custom-atom.xsl',
    },
  },
};

Writing your own XSLT can be complex, but you can also use xslt: true to turn on the built-in style:

const blogOptions = {
  feedOptions: {
    xslt: true,
  },
};

Blog Sidebar Grouping​

In #10252, we added support for grouping blog posts by years in the blog sidebar.

This feature is now turned on by default, but can be disabled with themeConfig.blog.sidebar.groupByYear: false.

Blog Consistency Options​

We added new blog options to enforce recommended practices for your blog posts:

onInlineAuthors​

We believe large multi-blogs are easier to manage by using global authors, declared in authors.yml. This notably permits to avoids duplicating author information across multiple blog posts, and now permits to generate author pages.

In #10224, we added the onInlineAuthors option. Use onInlineAuthors: 'throw' to forbid inline authors, and enforce a consistent usage of global authors.

onUntruncatedBlogPosts​

We believe blog posts are better using truncation markers (`

We are happy to announce Docusaurus 3.4.

Upgrading should be easy. Our release process respects Semantic Versioning. Minor versions do not include any breaking changes.

We are happy to announce Docusaurus 3.3.

Upgrading should be easy. Our release process respects Semantic Versioning. Minor versions do not include any breaking changes.

We are happy to announce Docusaurus 3.2.

The upgrade should be easy: as explained in our release process documentation, minor versions respect Semantic Versioning.