#How to run webpack build with watch code
With code splitting, developers can decide to load whole blocks of JavaScript only in response to some user interaction, like clicks or route changes (or other conditions).Ī piece of code that's splitted becomes a chunk. Code splittingĬode splitting, or lazy loading is an optimization technique for avoiding larger bundles. The main difference between them is that production mode automatically applies minification and other optimizations to your JavaScript code. Webpack has two modes of operations: development and production. For example there are plugins for extracting HTML, CSS, or for setting up environment variables. Plugins are third-party extensions that can alter how webpack works. Once the file becomes a module, webpack can use it as a dependency in your project. The goal of a loader is to transform files (other than JavaScript) in modules. For example there are loaders for CSS, for images, or for txt files. Loaders are third-party extensions that help webpack deal with various file extensions. The resulting JavaScript files are part of the so called bundle. The default output folder for webpack (since version 4) is dist/, configurable as well. The output is where the resulting JavaScript and static files are collected during the build process. The default entry point for webpack (since version 4) is src/index.js, and it's configurable. These dependencies form a dependency graph. In practice, it's a simple JavaScript file. Code splitting with optimization.splitChunksĪn entry point for webpack is the starting point from which all the dependencies of a frontend project are collected.Working with JavaScript's modules in webpack.
#How to run webpack build with watch how to
How to set up React, webpack 5, and Babel from scratch.The ultimate goal of webpack is to unify all these different sources and module types in a way that's possible to import everything in your JavaScript code, and finally produce a shippable output. That is, webpack is able to ingest dependencies from any of these sources. Webpack is a module bundler and has a broader definition of what a module is, specifically, for webpack, modules are: You might have heard about AMD modules, UMD, Common JS, ES modules.
What is webpack?Īs a JavaScript developer you should be familiar with the term module. If something doesn't work for you, drop me a polite email, and I'll try to fix the tutorial if I have time. Keep also in mind, frontend tooling changes so fast that I can't keep up updating every single blog post as quickly as $jsTool introduces breaking changes. This means I have no obligation to keep them constantly updated to the latest releases of the packages. My tutorials are free, no strings attached.
In this guide we'll see what webpack can do, and how to configure it to suit your needs.
Today CLI tools as create-react-app or Vue cli abstract away most of the configuration, and provide sane defaults.Įven then, understanding how things work under the hood is beneficial because sooner or later you'll need to make some adjustment to the defaults.