Why use webpack and node js manual#

This solved scope issues out of the box by importing each module as it was needed. Now that JavaScript is not running in a browser, how are Node applications supposed to load new chunks of code? There are no html files and script tags that can be added to it.Д¬ommonJS came out and introduced require, which allows you to load and use a module in the current file. When Node.js was released a new era started, and it came with new challenges. Webpack runs on Node.js, a JavaScript runtime that can be used in computers and servers outside a browser environment.

Birth of JavaScript Modules happened thanks to Node.js

Why use webpack and node js manual#

How do you treeshake the dependencies on your code? Lazy loading chunks of code can be hard to do at scale and requires a lot of manual work from the developer. How can you find out if code is actually being used or not?Д®ven if you only use a single function from lodash, you have to add the entire library and then squish it together. Concatenating makes it easier to reuse scripts across files but makes build optimizations more difficult. However, changing one file means you have to rebuild the whole thing. These tools are known as task runners, and they concatenate all your project files together. The use of IIFEs led to tools like Make, Gulp, Grunt, Broccoli or Brunch.

IIFEs solve scoping issues for large projects when script files are wrapped by an IIFE, you can safely concatenate or safely combine files without worrying about scope collision. IIFEs - Immediately invoked function expressions js file containing all your project code, but this leads to problems in scope, size, readability and maintainability. First, include a script for each functionality this solution is hard to scale because loading too many scripts can cause a network bottleneck. There are two ways to run JavaScript in a browser. Unfortunately, there are too many third-party libraries that do not play nice with Webpack (as I just discovered today), so pragmatically speaking you're better off installing modules in the distribution folder anyway.To understand why you should use webpack, let's recap how we used JavaScript on the web before bundlers were a thing. I disagree with the comments that suggest Webpack was not designed to bundle Node scripts, considering that Webpack has a specific setting for just that ( target). Bundling your code with your dependencies makes it virtually impossible. But bundling Lodash in your library will actually make it included twice, since npm is no longer managing this dependency.ДЄs a consumer of a library, I want the library code to include only its logic, and just state its dependencies so they could me merged/resolved with the rest of the dependencies in my project. If you're using Lodash, and the consumer of your library also has the same Lodash dependency, npm makes sure that it will be added only once.

It goes against the entire npm dependencies management.

However - you wouldn't want to bundle your code with its entire node_modules dependencies, for two reasons: When writing a node library, for instance, you may want to split your code to several files, and use Webpack to bundle them. webpack-node-external appears to be designed for use of NodeJS libraries, not standalone apps. I think you are correct that in your case, bundling into a single file would make more sense.