Installation

loom-dev depends on @loom-dev/preview, React and Vite outright — not as peers — so the CLI is self-contained.

Both packages are ESM-only ("type": "module") and published under the MIT license. All @loom-dev/* packages are versioned in lockstep — the changesets config marks them fixed, so a bump to one bumps them all. Mixing versions across @loom-dev/* is never a supported combination.

Loom 0.4.0 narrowed the range to match the reconciler — before that it advertised || ^19.0.0, and the failure surfaced at first render instead of at install.

This is also why the plugin aliases bare react by absolute path rather than using resolve.dedupe — dedupe would re-anchor React at your project root and could pick a different major. If you see Warning: Invalid hook call with a “more than one copy of React” hint, a React version mismatch is the first thing to check.

Only the plugin has peers at all; the CLI vendors its own copies. @loom-dev/preview declares two:

{
  "peerDependencies": {
    "react": "^18.3.1",
    "vite": "^6.0.0 || ^7.0.0"
  },
  "peerDependenciesMeta": {
    "vite": { "optional": true }
  }
}

vite is optional because the package’s non-Vite entry points (/client, /globals, /services) are useful without it — but loomPreview() obviously is not, so install Vite if you are using the plugin. The CLI brings its own.

There is no roblox-ts compile step in the preview loop, and no separate layout dependency. The Rust layout engine is compiled to WebAssembly and shipped inside @loom-dev/layout as a prebuilt .wasm — you never need a Rust toolchain to consume loom, only to develop it.

Published packages ship the wasm-opt-processed binary — about 178 kB, roughly 68 kB gzipped. Irrelevant for local previewing, worth knowing if you ship a static gallery build.

Loom is published from latest and versioned in lockstep across the scope, but it is still pre-1.0: minor bumps carry behavior changes. 0.3.0 is the first release where the plugin owns the whole preview — the generated page, entry detection and gallery mode — so anything written against 0.2.x that hand-rolled an index.html or a globals import still works, but no longer has to.

The toolchain widens. The layout engine is built from source, so you need Rust via rustup with the wasm32-unknown-unknown target (pinned in rust-toolchain.toml) and wasm-pack, alongside Node 24 and pnpm 11.

pnpm install builds the WASM engine through scripts/build-wasm.sh, emitting into packages/layout/pkg/. Rebuild it with pnpm build:native, or pnpm build:native:release for the wasm-opt-processed binary the release workflow ships. pnpm build:packages then builds the TypeScript packages with tsdown.

link: symlinks rather than copies, so the package’s own workspace:* dependencies resolve through the real path from the checkout’s node_modules — you never install loom’s dependency tree into your project. Importing the plugin from an unbuilt checkout has one extra wrinkle, covered in Advanced Vite setup.

Homebrew’s rustc ships no wasm32-unknown-unknown standard library, and Homebrew’s bin directory usually sits ahead of rustup’s in PATH. scripts/build-wasm.sh compensates by prepending $HOME/.cargo/bin to PATH itself, so the build works on a machine with both. If you invoke wasm-pack by hand, you have to do that yourself.