Unlocking the Power of Schema Libraries: Introducing Valibot
The widespread adoption of TypeScript has led to a significant evolution in schema libraries, moving beyond simple validation to encompass more complex operations like type safety and transformation. These libraries not only prevent developers from accidentally using the wrong data type, which can lead to bugs and errors, but also ensure that data is correct and meets the application’s requirements, and convert data from one format to another.
What is Valibot?
Valibot is an open-source, TypeScript-first schema library that validates unknown data. It’s comparable to other schema validation libraries like Zod and Yup, but with a significant advantage – it’s 98% smaller in size. Valibot is modular, type-safe, and enables bundle size minimization through code splitting, tree shaking, and compression. Its minimal, readable, and well-designed API is fully tested with 100% code coverage.
How Does Valibot Work?
Valibot’s core function is to create and validate schemas. It differs from other schema validation libraries in how it defines and executes schemas. Its schemas can be a string of any data type or a complex nested object, comparable to how types are defined in TypeScript. Valibot employs TypeScript inference to automatically generate TypeScript types that correspond to the defined schema.
Comparing Valibot’s Design Approach
Valibot employs a modular design, similar to Lodash’s one-function-per-file design approach. It relies on small and independent functions, each with just a single task. This design approach has several advantages, including extended functionality with external code and more. Its biggest advantage is that a bundler can use the import statements to remove dead code, resulting in a smaller bundle size.
Bundle Size Comparison
Valibot’s bundle size is significantly smaller than its competitors. While Zod’s bundle size is 57kB minified and 13.2kB when gzipped, and Yup’s bundle size is 40kB minified and 12.2kB when gzipped, Valibot’s bundle size is a mere 5.3kB. This reduction in size is due to Valibot’s tree shakable design, which allows only the necessary code to be included in the final bundle.
Installing and Using Valibot
Integrating Valibot into your project is straightforward. You can install it using npm or yarn, and then verify the installation by inspecting the package.json file in your project directory. Valibot offers various small functions that can be used to perform a variety of validation-related operations, from validating primitive values to more complex data sets.
Use Cases: Form Validation and Server Requests
Valibot is well-suited for a variety of use cases, but the most common are form validation and server request validation. Form validation ensures that user input is accurate and meets your application’s requirements, while server request validation helps prevent invalid data from reaching the server or application, leading to security vulnerabilities.
Conclusion
Schema validation libraries like Valibot offer a range of benefits, from preventing errors and ensuring data consistency to reducing bundle size. By choosing the right library for your needs, you can improve the overall performance and security of your application.