Handling version mismatch for singleton dependencies in Native Federation

[cmih-commify]

Hello everyone! It’s great to see the community moving over to the new repo.

We are currently migrating our Angular 20 application from Module Federation + Webpack to Native Federation ( @angular-architects/native-federation v20.1.7 ) + esbuild. Our architecture consists of a Shell and five Micro Frontends (remote apps) that share two common library dependencies.

In our previous Webpack-based setup, we could treat these common libraries as singletons while allowing different versions across various modules. However, since migrating to Native Federation, we’ve found that singleton dependencies seem constrained to the exact same version across the Shell and all modules.

Current Workaround: We are currently marking these libraries as external in the modules and defining their versions in the Shell. This is proving inefficient because:

• Updating a dependency in a module requires a corresponding update in the Shell.
• Since the Shell and modules have independent CI/CD pipelines, this workflow always forces the creation of at least two separate artifacts.

Shell federation.config.js

'@ui-common': {      
  singleton: true,      
  strictVersion: false,      
  requiredVersion: false,    
}

Module federation.config.js

externals: [    
  '@ui-common',  
]

My Question: Is there a way, using Native Federation + esbuild, to support different versions for common singleton dependencies, or is strict version parity required for singletons? There were some rumors that v21 of native-federation plugin will support it.

If this is not the place, I also asked on the native-federation plugin: angular-architects/module-federation-plugin#1049

[Aukevanoost]

This is just for aministration, thanks for the question! This is most certainly the right place:

Currently we're working on a migration path to our new orchestrator which supports this but we're not there yet.

If you feel like supporting give it a go! https://github.com/native-federation/orchestrator and feel free to tell us how it went, all feedback is welcome!

But if you want the more stable version there's currently this drop-in replacement orchestrator: https://github.com/topicusonderwijs/vanilla-native-federation

Here's an example: https://github.com/Aukevanoost/native-federation-examples-ng/tree/main/projects/vnf-host