#Architecture - How Zephyr works

Zephyr integrate with your existing build process, finish deployment seamlessly upon build, and remove the need to setup proxy tunnel, or wait for deployment in order to share a preview URL.

But when we run a command npm run build, does it interfere with bundler's build process and influence build output? How did it able to return preview URLs once the build is finished on your local terminal? What happens when we have an one-liner config and how could this one line achieve so much?

// ...import statement

export default withZephyr()({
  context: __dirname,
  entry: {
    main: './src/main.jsx',
  },
  //...rest of the code
});

We will talk about bundlers in this article to clear some confusions, answer the questions we get asked the most: How Zephyr works? and explaining how Zephyr build and deploy your application to the edge in millie-seconds.

#Building without interfering

Silence is a virtue

For all the plugins we've built to support a framework for deployment, we follow a similar pattern: starting with gathering your application's details and entering a series of lifecycle events after initiating Zephyr Agent.

Zephyr agent works on the bundler level, rather than a framework level, hence achieving framework agnostic deployment is a much faster process when it comes to a bundler we are already supporting. You can see a list of currently supported frameworks, bundlers and what's under development on supported page.

#Lifecycle Events

Zephyr agent starts here.

When we are collecting your application's details, we are understanding your github's organization, repository name and branch name to see if you have the correct access on Zephyr Cloud to deploy this application through our platform. We are also understanding your bundler's configuration details, applications' dependencies, name and versions.

We also aim understand whether this is an application using micro-frontend: is it a provider (in other words: remotes) to provide sub-modules for host app, or a consumer (in other word, a shell or a host) to consume remotes, or they are both. If they are, we move to the next to understand the relationships between your providers and consumers.

#Bundling

The next step is letting bundlers build your application and Zephyr joins the bundler at a later stage after build process is finished.

After bundlers finish building, we will be able to understand different asset types of your applications and construct a correct asset map for deployment.

When you are building your application for the first time, we will hash your assets and save both the hash and assets once the asset map is constructed and mapped. After your first build, whenever you are building again we will be comparing your assets against what's previous build and only update the hash results to create a snapshot of your application.

#Deploying

Whether you are deploying to our managed cloud, or on your own cloud, Zephyr will employ a series of capability providers to facilitate deployment, typically in the form of AWS Lambda function, or Cloudflare workers.

These capability providers will be deployed, and updated in our managed cloud as well as in your cloud. They will analyze the file types, hashed assets and then further on handling the deployment.

The assets will be updated and deployed to the cloud's storage.

Different cloud provider's implementation specific varies.