Use New installation methods for CKEditor5

Created on 2 June 2025, about 2 months ago

Problem/Motivation

CKEditor5 DLL build is deprecated and will be EOL by the end of 2025 (https://ckeditor.com/docs/ckeditor5/latest/updating/nim-migration/migrat...).

The DLLs will be supported until the end of 2025.

What we will sunset on this date:

  1. The documentation for DLLs will be removed.
  2. New versions of npm packages published after this date will not have build directory. It will not be possible to import files from those destinations.

Steps to reproduce

Proposed resolution

Use the new installation method

  • Published in the 42.0.0 version (released July 2024).
  • Provide many improvements: work well with all modern bundlers (i.e. bundler-agnostic), decoupled styles from the JavaScript layer.
  • Two ways of self-hosted setup:
  • Two ways of cloud (CDN) hosting:

Remaining tasks

Decide whether to use UMD globals/ESM
Decide whether to keep webpack or use a different bundler
Migrate the import paths in ckeditor5 plugins
Update ckeditor5 libraries assets

User interface changes

Introduced terminology

API changes

Since the new installation method is not compatible with the DLL build, contrib modules need to provide plugins with the new installation method. I'm not sure how we're gonna handle this.

Data model changes

Release notes snippet

📌 Task
Status

Active

Version

11.0 🔥

Component

ckeditor5.module

Created by

🇮🇩Indonesia el7cosmos 🇮🇩 GMT+7

Live updates comments and jobs are added and updated live.
Sign in to follow issues

Comments & Activities

  • Issue created by @el7cosmos
  • 🇺🇸United States bnjmnm Ann Arbor, MI

    I have a proof of concept from last year that successfully does this, and the CK team + several committers were in support of the approach. The biggest part will likely be finalizing Add an API for importmaps Active , after which most of the CK changes are not too intense.

    I also created a doc that details the approach and provides steps for several contrib modules on how to approach it

  • 🇦🇺Australia larowlan 🇦🇺🏝.au GMT+10
  • 🇦🇺Australia larowlan 🇦🇺🏝.au GMT+10
  • 🇮🇩Indonesia el7cosmos 🇮🇩 GMT+7

    Have we already decided to use import map? Another option with the new installation method is using UMD build, which shouldn't be blocked by anything

  • 🇺🇸United States bnjmnm Ann Arbor, MI

    ESM + import map approach gives contrib maintainers the ability to support both types of CKEditor5 builds with a single codebase.

    I don't believe the UMD approach can accommodate that, which would mean maintainers having to maintain two separate versions, one that uses imports and the other pulling from the global CKEditor. If there's a way around that - great. If not, then I suppose we need to decide what tradeoffs are acceptable.

Production build 0.71.5 2024