webpack-config-utils

Utilities to help your webpack config be easier to read

The problem

Webpack configuration is a JavaScript object which is awesomely declarative. However, the webpack config file can easily turn into an imperative mess in the process of creating the configuration object.

This solution

The goal of this project is to provide utilities to make it easier to compose your config object so it's easier for people to read. It has some custom methods and also comes bundled with some other projects to expose some helpful utility functions.

Installation

This module is distributed via npm which is bundled with node and should be installed as one of your project's devDependencies:

npm install --save-dev webpack-config-utils

Usage

It is expected that you use this in your webpack.config.js file.

Protip: You can name your config file webpack.config.babel.js and it'll be automagically transpiled! (Make sure you have babel-register installed.) So you could use ES6 module imports rather than CommonJS requires. But this example will stick to CommonJS because we love you ❤️

const webpack = require('webpack')
const {getIfUtils, removeEmpty} = require('webpack-config-utils')

const {ifProduction, ifNotProduction} = getIfUtils(process.env.NODE_ENV)

module.exports = {
  // ... your config
  mode: ifProduction('production', 'development'),
  entry: removeEmpty({
     app: ifProduction('./indexWithoutCSS', './indexWithCSS'),
     css: ifProduction('./style.scss')
  }),
  output: {
    chunkFilename: ifProduction('js/[id].[contenthash].js', 'js/[name].js'),
    filename: ifProduction('js/[id].[contenthash].js', 'js/[name].js'),
  },
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.(sc|c)ss$/,
        exclude: /node_modules/,
        use: removeEmpty([
          ifProduction(MiniCssExtractPlugin.loader),
          ifNotProduction({loader: 'style-loader', options: {sourceMap: true}}),
          {loader: 'css-loader', options: {sourceMap: true}},
          {loader: 'postcss-loader', options: {sourceMap: true}},
          {loader: 'sass-loader', options: {sourceMap: true}},
        ]),
      },
  },
  plugins: removeEmpty([
    ifProduction(
      new MiniCssExtractPlugin({
        filename: 'css/[id].[contenthash].css',
      })
    ),
    ifProduction(new webpack.DefinePlugin({
      'process.env': {
        NODE_ENV: '"production"',
      },
    })),
    new HtmlWebpackPlugin({
      template: './index.html',
      inject: 'head',
    }),
    ifProduction(new OfflinePlugin()),
  ]),
}

Then you'd invoke the webpack config with cross-env in your package.json scripts (or with nps):

{
  // your package.json stuff
  scripts: {
    "build:dev": "cross-env NODE_ENV=development webpack",
    "build:prod": "cross-env NODE_ENV=production webpack"
  }
}

Things get even better with webpack 2+ because you can write your webpack config as a function that accepts an env argument which you can set on the command line (which means you don't need cross-env 👍).

const webpack = require('webpack')
const {resolve} = require('path')
const {getIfUtils} = require('webpack-config-utils')

module.exports = env => {
  const {ifDev} = getIfUtils(env)
  return {
    output: {
      // etc.
      pathinfo: ifDev(),
      path: resolve(__dirname, 'dist'),
    },
    // etc.
  }
}

API

The API Documentation is still to come. In addition to custom utilities from this package, it comes bundled with another helpful utility: webpack-combine-loaders (exposed as combineLoaders).