Getting Started — Overview

Native Federation is a set of tools to build decentralized micro frontends architectures. It consists of two components — a builder for the remotes (micro frontends), and a runtime for the shell/host.

The builder itself splits in two: a Core that does the heavy lifting, and a bundler-specific Adapter (Angular, esbuild, …) that wires the Core into your build pipeline. On the host side that runtime is the Orchestrator, with semver-aware version resolution and cross-reload caching; the classic Runtime it replaces is deprecated and end-of-life.

To help you find the right information, we broke the information up into sections: "Getting started" gives you an overview of how the components work together, the "orchestrator" part shows you how you can hook native-federation into your (existing) application. The "core" part shows how native-federation builds your remotes and how you can influence/optimize the build process. Finally, the adapters are for your specific setup. We provide first-class support for Angular but we're also providing some options for your favorite framework/setup. The lightweight "esbuild" adapter is your general jack-of-all-trades that will work with most frameworks, but if you need more customizability, BYOA! (build your own adapter).

Build a remote

• Core — Getting Started — install @softarc/native-federation and wire the core builder into a custom build script with a bundler adapter. v4.
• esbuild Adapter — Getting Started — install the esbuild adapter and build your first React remote end-to-end. v4.
• Angular Adapter — Getting Started — scaffold a host and a remote with ng add in minutes. v4.

Load remotes on a host at runtime

• Orchestrator — Getting Started — the drop-in quickstart bundle, the event registry, and writing your own initFederation script. v3 & v4.
• Angular Adapter — Runtime — the Angular bootstrap split, threading the loader through DI, and dynamic remotes. v4 (v3 on its own page).

New to Native Federation?

If you've landed here without context, start with the conceptual pages first:

• Architecture Overview — how Core, Adapters, Runtime and Orchestrator fit together.
• The Mental Model — hosts, remotes, shared dependencies, and version handling.
• Terminology — the vocabulary used across the docs.
• v3 vs v4 — when to use which, and what changed.