Modernizing My Workflow: Migrating to Bun and Biome

Why the Change?

In modern web development, toolchain fatigue is real. For a long time, the standard setup involved a mix of ESLint for linting, Prettier for formatting, and npm or yarn for package management. While these tools are battle-tested, they can sometimes feel slow and require complex configurations to work together seamlessly.

Recently, I decided to modernize this website's infrastructure by migrating to two rising stars in the ecosystem: Bun and Biome.

Biome: One Tool to Rule Them All

Biome is an extremely fast toolchain for web projects that aims to provide a unified experience for linting and formatting.

What I Gained

Incredible Speed: Biome is written in Rust and is orders of magnitude faster than ESLint and Prettier. Linting and formatting the entire project now happens in milliseconds.
Simplified Configuration: Instead of managing .eslintrc, .prettierrc, and various ignore files, I now have a single biome.json.
Better Integration: No more fighting between Prettier and ESLint rules. Biome handles both, ensuring they never conflict.

The Migration Process

The migration involved:

Uninstalling over a dozen ESLint and Prettier-related packages.
Initializing Biome with bun x @biomejs/biome init.
Configuring biome.json to match my preferred style (tabs for indentation, double quotes for strings).
Fixing accessibility (a11y) and security warnings that Biome's recommended rules caught.

Bun: The All-in-One JavaScript Runtime

Bun has replaced npm as my package manager and test runner. It's designed for speed and developer productivity.

Why Bun?

Blazing Fast Installs: Dependency installation is significantly faster, which is especially noticeable in CI/CD pipelines.
Built-in Tooling: Bun includes a bundler, test runner (though I'm using Vitest, which runs perfectly on Bun), and package manager out of the box.
Compatibility: It works seamlessly with existing Node.js packages and Next.js.

Infrastructure Updates

The move to Bun and Biome also meant updating the deployment pipeline:

GitHub Actions

I updated the CI workflow to use oven-sh/setup-bun. The entire pipeline—from installation to linting and testing—now finishes much quicker, providing faster feedback on Pull Requests.

Netlify

My Netlify configuration now uses Bun for building the site. By setting BUN_VERSION in netlify.toml, I ensured the build environment is consistent with my local development setup.

Results

After the migration:

Zero Lint Errors: The codebase is now fully compliant with Biome's recommended rules.
Faster CI: Total pipeline time has been reduced.
Cleaner Repo: Fewer configuration files and dependencies to maintain.

Modernizing the toolchain isn't just about using the latest tech; it's about reducing friction in the development process. With Bun and Biome, I can focus more on building features and less on managing my tools.