Improve "work on both an MFE app and `frontend-base` itself at the same time" developer experience

[brian-smith-tcril]

module.config.js doesn't work

issues encountered using module.config.js

ERROR in ../frontend-base/index.ts 7:7
Module parse failed: Unexpected token (7:7)
File was processed with these loaders:
 * ./node_modules/@pmmmwh/react-refresh-webpack-plugin/loader/index.js
You may need an additional loader to handle the result of these loaders.
| export * from './runtime';
| 
> export type * from './types';
| 
| export * from './types';
 @ ./src/Main.tsx 7:0-60 13:25-43
 @ ./src/routes.jsx 12:0-26 16:19-23
 @ ./src/index.ts 4:0-50 4:0-50
 @ ./site.config.dev.tsx 3:0-33 14:11-19
 @ ./node_modules/@openedx/frontend-base/runtime/initialize.js 62:0-37 132:19-29 133:27-37 136:21-31
 @ ./node_modules/@openedx/frontend-base/runtime/index.ts 6:0-72 6:0-72 6:0-72 6:0-72 6:0-72
 @ ./node_modules/@openedx/frontend-base/shell/site.tsx 15:0-80 20:10-20 28:10-25 32:0-10 20:0-9 28:0-9

Just using file: doesn't work (todo: add info about issues found when trying that)

Manually running npm run pack and then installing the .tgz slows iteration to a crawl

[brian-smith-tcril]

tl;dr

After trying quite a few things I managed to use an LLM to generate some scripts that make this feel somewhat decent.

Context

Trying to install from a directory is messy. Using file: leads to symlink issues (this can be worked around via config or install args, but with that we'd still need to add manual watching for changes). module.config.js leads to the same problems I saw when using file:.

Installing the npm packed .tgz works as expected.

Proposed solution

Set up some automation to:

• Build/pack a new .tgz when frontend-base files change
  • c992d5f
• Install the new .tgz and restart the dev server when the .tgz changes
  • openedx/frontend-app-authn@548a94c

Next steps

• Decide if this is OK as a general approach
  • If it is, clean up the LLM generated code to better fit our specific use case
  • If it isn't, figure out what a general approach we'd be happy with should look like