Roadmap Update: Start v2 and Ecosystem

[atilafassina]

Hey, folks.

Long time no talk, our last announcement was done when beginning the DeVinxi work. We have successfully completed that and I'm happy to let you know that we have SolidStart v2 being used in production already in real-world apps, like OpenCode Console

As per the last announcement, our plan was to maintain Start and Solid in a version lockstep, it seemed possible with the works in Nitro v3, Solid v2, and Start v2 converging into similar release dates. We are now deciding against this plan in order to provide a better Developer Experience and migration plan for existing Start v1 and Solid v1 apps.

For us to reach ideal support in Solid v2 we would also need breaking changes in Router and Meta packages. However since the team has managed to keep the DeVinxi effort with minimal breaking changes, we believe it's worth the effort to create a stable release in the new architecture in order to lay down an incremental migration step towards the future of Solid.

Migrating from Start v1 to v2 requires small changes to vite.config.ts, tsconfig.json, and optionally to your createMiddleware signature. Although the internals are much different and improved, there is no change impacting your Server Functions, Actions, or component code.

I recommend you to give it a try, follow migration docs

Updated Timeline

Remaining blockers in SolidStart alpha

• new directives plugin
• built-in server-only environment variables support

At this point, we don't anticipate any breaking changes to user-facing APIs already. But we need to land the above changes before moving to Beta.

Beta

Once those pull-requests are merged, we will release Start 2.0.0-beta.0.
Collect feedback, security audits, and address bugs. And consolidate our recommended server runtime from Nitro v2 to Nitro v3.

We also plan to deprecate the @solidjs/vite-plugin-nitro-2 in favor of Nitro 3 Beta.

As said above, we don't plan any breaking changes here. Unless something critical surface from audits or bugfixes, APIs are stable.

Release Candidate

By the time we're confident enough that the APIs are stable, we will ship 2.0.0-rc.0 , effectively deprecating Start v1, the create-solid CLI will stop offering Start v1 as an option and we will update the official docs with deprecation warnings on v1-only APIs.

Solid v2

As the ecosystem adapts to the new APIs and updates land in Solid-Router and Solid-Meta, we will start working on support for Solid v2.

Though likely, it's not certain if supporting Solid 2 means v3 for Start. Start v2 will not drop support on Solid v1.

If there's a chance to support an incremental migration from Solid v1 to v2 within Start v2, we will try it. But at this point we're not ready to make any promises.

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We are also working on developing a plugin-based ecosystem for your apps.
The first package is the long awaited <Image> component with built-in image optimization.

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As always, we're open and eager for feedback.
Follow the migration plan to upgrade an existing app.
For new ones, you can use the CLI

pnpm create solid --start --v2

If you've tried Start v2 alpha, then we'd love to hear your feedback!
Join us on Solid discord

Cheers from the Start team 👋