A bunch of Facebook apps aren't working - and now we know why

Many users have reported that their favorite Facebook apps are no longer working following a recent change to a popular open source software project.

The open source project responsible is developed by Facebook's parent company Meta and is called Create React App. Distributed on both GitHub and npm, Create React App is designed to help developers quickly build single-page React applications with just a few simple commands. As a result, loads of developers rely on it to build apps for Facebook and other sites.

GitHub users recently began reporting problems when trying to build their create-react-app builds after receiving the following error message: “Type:Error: MiniCssExtractPlugin is not a constructor”. This error message shows that the problem doesn't lie with Create React App itself but rather with one of its dependencies called Mini CSS Extract Plugin.

Mini CSS Extract Plugin is another popular project that over 4.6m GitHub repos and more than 7,000 npm projects rely on. This project is used to extract CSS code into separate files, generating a CSS file per each JavaScript file that contains CSS according to BleepingComputer.

Potential workarounds

The latest version of the Mini CSS Extract Plugin (v. 2.5.0) was published quite recently and it appears that this update is what is leading to Create React App project builds to fail.

While BleepingComputer believes that the addition of “types” to the plugin could be what is leading to Create React App instances to break, a bug report on GitHub takes a further look at some possible causes.

Until Facebook's open source team releases a proper fix for the issue, some developers have been able to get their Create React App builds to work by downgrading Mini CSS Extract Plugin to version 2.4.5. According to developer Alexandru Pavalovi, you can pin your version to 2.4.5 by adding several lines of code to your JavaScript app's package.json file. The code that needs to be added is:

"resolutions": {

    "mini-css-extract-plugin": "2.4.5"

},

However, this workaround doesn't work for those not using Yarn but front-end developer Oscar Busk says that running the following command (npm i -D --save-exact mini-css-extract-plugin@2.4.5) may work.

Hopefully the problem will be resolved soon with a more permanent fix but until then, you can try testing out these two workarounds to get your Create React App builds to work.

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Via BleepingComputer

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