StackBlitz June 2022 Update

The conference season has officially begun with StackBlitz getting major shoutouts at OpenJS World and the JSNation Conference. For us it was also a month of two alpha releases: Firefox support and WebContainers API. We are on the roll and we are not stopping any time soon! Today we are bringing you:

• StackBlitz in the wild: news from our community
• DX & Compatibility improvements: the change log
• Quick bites for the road

I hope you’ll have a wonderful month!

StackBlitz in the wild

• Have you seen Rich Harris’ talk at the OpenJS World conference where he presented the new SvelteKit tutorial? Spoiler alert: the talk includes a sea shanty sing-along 🏴‍☠️ Also, the tutorial is amazing and it’s powered by headless WebContainers (also known as WebContainer API).
• Speaking of conferences, Nathan Walker presented the capabilities of NativeScript at the OpenJS World Conference - and showcased NativeScript Preview 2.0, a way to do mobile app development locally or on StackBlitz. You can request private access here.
• A huge shoutout to Faizan Ahmed and Ray Foss, two of our community members who submitted vulnerability reports!
• Refine is a React-based framework for building internal tools and their team has just migrated all of their examples to StackBlitz 👏
• We’ve just noticed that the homepage of NestJS, a progressive Node.js framework, features a very pretty StackBlitz project!
• Do you like thinking about the future? Fireship has published a video on the “bleeding edge tech stack for 2025” used for this page revamp, which will feature quizzes and interactive demos running on StackBlitz.

DX & compatibility improvements

As we’re working on new tools, we are finishing the month with a whole plethora of improvements:

• WebContainers project configuration:
  • Added the possibility to change the “Compile trigger” setting for WebContainers-based projects in the Settings sidebar. This option controls whether updates made in the editor are applied immediately to the virtual filesystem, after a short delay (default), or only when explicitly saving the project.
  • Fixed a bug in WebContainers projects, when user opens a file visible in files panel through terminal and then wants to rename it. Previously, after renaming file with the old name remains and is empty and couldn’t be removed/renamed. Now renaming happens as expected.
• Bug fixes and improvements:
  • Fixed an issue where opening the same project in two tabs would prevent it from running.
  • Added a descriptive error when importing too large projects for StackBlitz to handle (We’re working on removing the limitation, too!).
  • Fixed an issue where users hitting Control + S (or Command + S on macOS) in embedded projects could result in the project being forked, showing an unnecessary "Project forked!" message, and breaking some features of the StackBlitz SDK.
  • Fixed “Fork on StackBlitz” button for embedded view of GitHub projects
  • Now we pass query params to the “Fork on” button for embedded projects
  • Fixed loading of binary files when you switch git branches
  • Fixed an issue with the TypeScript language server which couldn’t find files containing $ in the filename.
  • Fixed an issue with TypeScript not finding the correct type definitions if it points to a directory ending with a /.
  • Fixed rare improper conflict detection on project’s fork due to race condition.
  • Fixed an issue where the “Static (HTML/JS/CSS)” starter’s index.html could not load CSS files when using a valid doctype.
  • Fixed a bug where embedded projects with transient file changes could show an unnecessary warning when trying to close the parent page.
  • Added support for Ctrl+Shift+C to copy text from the terminal for non-macOS users.
  • Fixed an issue when one couldn’t close an editor tab and then re-open it by clicking the file tree
  • When creating a new GitHub repository in the editor’s sidebar, changed the default Git branch name is now main (instead of master - read why).
  • Started regenerating cached package-lock.json for GitHub-powered projects. No more outdated dependencies for your starter projects!
  • Slightly clarified disclaimer when a user disconnects repository from project. Now it states that repository won’t be affected.
• Browser compatibility improvements:
  • The omnibar is no longer in focus in Firefox when clearing the terminal with cmd+k.
• Docs:
  • We’ve added social preview images to our documentation pages!
  • We published two pages:
    • a list of all the project starters with custom domains
    • and of all the keyboard shortcuts available in our editor.

Quick bites for the road

• If you’re craving some technical wisdom, listen to this talk on inner workings of Vite Build by Matias Capeletto, our colleague and Vite core maintainer who’s also known as Patak.
• This month we made a big announcement: WebContainers are now supported in Firefox on desktop and Android! You can read the announcement post here. Also, check out the blog post by one of our engineers, Roberto Vidal, who describes our journey towards Firefox support.
• We have now opened invitations for alpha WebContainers API. To request an invite, please fill out this form - we will contact you within the next three months.

What’s next?

We are so excited for what the nearest future will bring — we are cooking something really special for you! In the meantime, stay tuned on Twitter or join our Discord community.