The primary goal of Webpack is to bundle Javascript files for usage in the browser or with nodejs. Webpack works with popular frameworks including react, vue and angular.
- Install
- Introduction
- Concepts
- Contributing
- Support
- Core Team
- Sponsoring
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- Gold Sponsors
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- Special Thanks
Install with npm:
npm install --save-dev webpackInstall with yarn:
yarn add webpack --devThe primary goal of Webpack is to bundle Javascript files for usage in the browser or with nodejs. Webpack works with popular frameworks including react, vue and angular.
TL;DR
- Bundles ES Modules, CommonJS, and AMD modules (even combined).
- You can create segments of code that are loaded on demand and that run in the background, asynchronously (to improve a program's initial load and execution time).
- The plugin system is highly modular, allowing developers to create add-ons to extend the functionality of the application.
- Dependencies are resolved during compilation, which reduces the runtime size.
Check out webpack's quick Get Started guide and the other guides.
Webpack supports all browsers that are ES5-compliant (IE8 and below are not supported).
Webpack also needs Promise for import() and require.ensure(). If you want to support older browsers, you will need to load a polyfill before using these expressions.
Webpack has a rich plugin interface. Most of the features within webpack itself use this plugin interface. This makes webpack very flexible.
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| mini-css-extract-plugin |  |
Extracts CSS into separate files. It creates a CSS file per JS file which contains CSS. | |
| compression-webpack-plugin |  |
Prepares compressed versions of assets to serve them with Content-Encoding | |
| html-webpack-plugin |  |
Simplifies creation of HTML files (index.html) to serve your bundles |
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| pug-plugin |  |
Renders Pug files to HTML, extracts JS and CSS from sources specified directly in Pug. |
Webpack enables the use of loaders to process files before they are bundled. This allows you to bundle any static resource, such as images or fonts. You can easily write your own loaders using Node.js.
Loaders are activated by using loadername! prefixes in require() statements,
or are automatically applied via regex from your webpack configuration.
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| val-loader |  |
Executes code as module and considers exports as JS code |
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
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Loads and transpiles a CSON file |
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
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Loads ES2015+ code and transpiles to ES5 using Babel | |
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Loads TypeScript like JavaScript | |
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Loads CoffeeScript like JavaScript |
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
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Exports HTML as string, requires references to static resources | |
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Loads Pug templates and returns a function | |
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Compiles Pug to a function or HTML string, useful for use with Vue, React, Angular | |
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Compiles Markdown to HTML | |
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Loads and transforms a HTML file using PostHTML | |
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Compiles Handlebars to HTML |
Extreme speed without needing a cache ES6 and CommonJS modules Tree shaking of ES6 modules An API for JavaScript and Go TypeScript and JSX syntax Source maps Minification Plugins
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
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Loads and compiles Vue Components | |
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Process HTML & CSS with preprocessor of choice and require() Web Components like first-class modules |
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Loads and compiles Angular 2 Components | |
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Riot official webpack loader |
Webpack uses asynchronous I/O, which enables it to run multiple caching levels. This makes Webpack fast and incredibly fast on incremental compilations.
Webpack supports ECMAScript 2015+, CommonJS, and AMD modules out of the box. It performs static analysis on the abstract syntax tree of your code, giving you an evaluation engine to evaluate simple expressions. This allows you to support most existing libraries out of the box.
Webpack allows you to split your codebase into multiple chunks. Chunks are loaded asynchronously at runtime. This reduces the initial loading time.
Webpack can perform many optimizations to reduce the output size of your JavaScript, including deduplication of identical modules and minification. It can also perform code splitting to download only those modules that are needed initially and to load additional modules at runtime.
Building software is often easier if you break your project into smaller separate pieces, since it can reduce unexpected interactions and dramatically reduce the complexity of problems you'll need to solve. Unfortunately, JavaScript has not historically included this capability as a core feature in the language. This finally changed with ES6, which includes syntax for importing and exporting functions and data so they can be shared between separate scripts. The specification is now fixed, but it is only implemented in modern browsers and not finalised in Node.js. Rollup allows you to write your code using the new module system, and will then compile it back down to existing supported formats such as CommonJS modules, AMD modules, and IIFE-style scripts.
We want contributing to webpack to be fun, enjoyable, and educational for anyone, and everyone. We have a vibrant ecosystem that spans beyond this single repo. We welcome you to check out any of the repositories in our organization or webpack-contrib organization which houses all of our loaders and plugins.
Contributions go far beyond pull requests and commits. Although we love giving you the opportunity to put your stamp on webpack, we also are thrilled to receive a variety of other contributions including:
- Documentation updates, enhancements, designs, or bugfixes
- Spelling or grammar fixes
- README.md corrections or redesigns
- Adding unit, or functional tests
- Triaging GitHub issues -- especially determining whether an issue still persists or is reproducible.
- Searching #webpack on twitter and helping someone else who needs help
- Teaching others how to contribute to one of the many webpack's repos!
- Blogging, speaking about, or creating tutorials about one of webpack's many features.
- Helping others in our webpack gitter channel.
To get started have a look at our documentation on contributing.
If you are worried or don't know where to start, you can always reach out to Sean Larkin (@TheLarkInn) on Twitter or simply submit an issue and a maintainer can help give you guidance!
We have also started a series on our Medium Publication called The Contributor's Guide to webpack. We welcome you to read it and post any questions or responses if you still need help.
Looking to speak about webpack? We'd love to review your talk abstract/CFP! You can email it to webpack [at] opencollective [dot] com and we can give pointers or tips!!!
If you create a loader or plugin, we would <3 for you to open source it, and put it on npm. We follow the x-loader, x-webpack-plugin naming convention.
We consider webpack to be a low-level tool used not only individually but also layered beneath other awesome tools. Because of its flexibility, webpack isn't always the easiest entry-level solution, however we do believe it is the most powerful. That said, we're always looking for ways to improve and simplify the tool without compromising functionality. If you have any ideas on ways to accomplish this, we're all ears!
If you're just getting started, take a look at our new docs and concepts page. This has a high level overview that is great for beginners!!
Looking for webpack 1 docs? Please check out the old wiki, but note that this deprecated version is no longer supported.
If you want to discuss something or just need help, here is our Gitter room where there are always individuals looking to help out!
If you are still having difficulty, we would love for you to post a question to StackOverflow with the webpack tag. It is much easier to answer questions that include your webpack.config.js and relevant files! So if you can provide them, we'd be extremely grateful (and more likely to help you find the answer!)
If you are twitter savvy you can tweet #webpack with your question and someone should be able to reach out and help also.
If you have discovered a 🐜 or have a feature suggestion, feel free to create an issue on Github.
Tobias Koppers Core Founder of webpack |
Johannes Ewald Loaders & Plugins Early adopter of webpack |
Sean T. Larkin Public Relations Founder of the core team |
Kees Kluskens Development Sponsor 
|
Most of the core team members, webpack contributors and contributors in the ecosystem do this open source work in their free time. If you use webpack for a serious task, and you'd like us to invest more time on it, please donate. This project increases your income/productivity too. It makes development and applications faster and it reduces the required bandwidth.
This is how we use the donations:
- Allow the core team to work on webpack
- Thank contributors if they invested a large amount of time in contributing
- Support projects in the ecosystem that are of great value for users
- Support projects that are voted most (work in progress)
- Infrastructure cost
- Fees for money handling
Before we started using OpenCollective, donations were made anonymously. Now that we have made the switch, we would like to acknowledge these sponsors (and the ones who continue to donate using OpenCollective). If we've missed someone, please send us a PR, and we'll add you to this list.
Become a gold sponsor and get your logo on our README on Github with a link to your site.
Become a silver sponsor and get your logo on our README on Github with a link to your site.
Become a bronze sponsor and get your logo on our README on Github with a link to your site.
Become a backer and get your image on our README on Github with a link to your site.
(In chronological order)
- @google for Google Web Toolkit (GWT), which aims to compile Java to JavaScript. It features a similar Code Splitting as webpack.
- @medikoo for modules-webmake, which is a similar project. webpack was born because I wanted Code Splitting for modules-webmake. Interestingly the Code Splitting issue is still open (thanks also to @Phoscur for the discussion).
- @substack for browserify, which is a similar project and source for many ideas.
- @jrburke for require.js, which is a similar project and source for many ideas.
- @defunctzombie for the browser-field spec, which makes modules available for node.js, browserify and webpack.
- Every early webpack user, which contributed to webpack by writing issues or PRs. You influenced the direction...
- @shama, @jhnns and @sokra for maintaining this project
- Everyone who has written a loader for webpack. You are the ecosystem...
- Everyone I forgot to mention here, but also influenced webpack.