While baler is still heavily under development, the setup process is not quite as simple as it's intended to be. This document will continue to be updated to describe the whole process of setup, from start to finish.
Please make sure to follow all steps in the order they're documented below.
baler needs to run PHP and load classes from Magento, so make sure PHP is setup correctly for use with Magento. See the Magento documentation for more details.
Verify you either have php available in your $PATH, or set the $BALER_PHP_PATH environment variable to point to the binary.
You will need a version of node.js that is >= 10.12.0. You can check if this is already available from the command line via node -v.
An installation of node.js includes npm, which will be needed for the next steps.
git clone the repository locally. Then, cd into the root directory and run npm install.
As a sanity check, run npm test to verify that baler's unit tests are passing
Run npm run build in the root of the baler directory to compile from source
Run npm link in the baler directory, which will add the baler binary to your $PATH
After the module is installed, run bin/magento config:set dev/js/enable_baler_js_bundling 1 to enable loading of baler assets.
Run the following commands to disable incompatible features in your store:
bin/magento config:set dev/js/minify_files 0
bin/magento config:set dev/js/enable_js_bundling 0
bin/magento config:set dev/js/merge_files 0
You can see the details in the open issue. If you just want to apply the fixes, see the patch in core
rm -rf the pub/static directory of your store, and then run bin/magento setup:static-content:deploy to ensure all files are deployed with incompatible features disabled.
In the root directory of your Magento 2 store, run baler to optimizize all deployed front-end themes.
To make sure that Magento_Baler gets a chance to participate in rendering, run bin/magento cache:clean so new page caches can be generated
If all steps were followed in order, and you did not find any bugs, most pages in your storefront should now be faster than they were before.
If you found a bug, please open a new issue