Webpack is a module bundler. Its main purpose is to bundle JavaScript files for usage in a browser, yet it is also capable of transforming, bundling, or packaging just about any resource or asset.
- Install
- Introduction
- Concepts
- Contributing
- Support
- Current project members
- Sponsoring
- Special Thanks
Install with npm:
npm install --save-dev webpack
Install with yarn:
yarn add webpack --dev
Webpack is a bundler for modules. The main purpose is to bundle JavaScript files for usage in a browser, yet it is also capable of transforming, bundling, or packaging just about any resource or asset.
TL;DR
- Bundles ES Modules, CommonJS, and AMD modules (even combined).
- Can create a single bundle or multiple chunks that are asynchronously loaded at runtime (to reduce initial loading time).
- Dependencies are resolved during compilation, reducing the runtime size.
- Loaders can preprocess files while compiling, e.g. TypeScript to JavaScript, Handlebars strings to compiled functions, images to Base64, etc.
- Highly modular plugin system to do whatever else your application requires.
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.
Webpack generates HTML pages and extracts CSS files itself — stable and on by
default since 5.109.0, replacing the deprecated html-webpack-plugin and
mini-css-extract-plugin. Point an entry at an .html file, or set
output.html: true to generate a page for a JavaScript entry (if a rule of your
own already handles .html files, also set experiments.html: true; that
also resolves an ESM import without an extension, such as ./page, to page.html
before page.js). See what that covers for
CSS and
HTML.
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| compression-webpack-plugin | Prepares compressed versions of assets to serve them with Content-Encoding | ||
| html-bundler-webpack-plugin | Renders a template (EJS, Handlebars, Pug) with referenced source asset files into HTML. | ||
| pug-plugin | Renders Pug files to HTML, extracts JS and CSS from sources specified directly in Pug. |
Webpack enables the use of loaders to preprocess files. This allows you to bundle any static resource way beyond JavaScript. 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.
JavaScript, JSON and assets need no
loader, and CSS and
HTML have built-in
support, so css-loader, style-loader and html-loader are no longer needed —
but preprocessors and template engines keep their loaders.
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loads and transpiles a CSON file |
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loads ES2015+ code and transpiles to ES5 using Babel | |||
 |
Loads TypeScript like JavaScript | ||
| Loads CoffeeScript like JavaScript |
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compiles Pug to a function or HTML string, useful for use with Vue, React, Angular | |||
| Compiles Markdown to HTML | |||
| Loads and transforms a HTML file using PostHTML | |||
| Compiles Handlebars to HTML |
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loads and compiles a LESS file | |||
| Loads and compiles a Sass/SCSS file | |||
| Loads and compiles a Stylus file | |||
| Loads and transforms a CSS/SSS file using PostCSS |
| Name | Status | Install Size | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| Loads and compiles Vue Components | |||
 |
Process HTML & CSS with preprocessor of choice and require() Web Components like first-class modules |
||
| Loads and compiles Angular 2 Components | |||
| Riot official webpack loader | |||
| Official Svelte loader |
Webpack uses async I/O and has multiple caching levels. This makes webpack fast and incredibly fast on incremental compilations.
Webpack supports ES2015+, CommonJS and AMD modules out of the box. It performs clever static analysis on the AST of your code. It even has 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 do many optimizations to reduce the output size of your JavaScript by deduplicating frequently used modules, minifying, and giving you full control of what is loaded initially and what is loaded at runtime through code splitting. It can also make your code chunks cache friendly by using hashes.
If you're working on webpack itself, or building advanced plugins or integrations, the tools below can help you explore internal mechanics, debug plugin life-cycles, and build custom tooling.
| Name | Status | Description |
|---|---|---|
| tapable-tracer | Traces tapable hook execution in real-time and collects structured stack frames. Can export to UML for generating visualizations. |
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.
- The Contributor's Guide to webpack
To get started have a look at our documentation on contributing.
For when your change reaches npm, see RELEASE_SCHEDULE.md — patch releases go out as soon as possible, minor releases every 4 weeks on Thursday.
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!!
If you have discovered a 🐜 or have a feature suggestion, feel free to create an issue on GitHub.
For information about the governance of the webpack project, see GOVERNANCE.md.
- alexander-akait - Alexander Akait <[email protected]> (he/him)
- avivkeller - Aviv Keller <[email protected]> (he/him)
- evenstensberg - Even Stensberg <[email protected]> (he/him)
- thelarkinn - Sean Larkin <[email protected]> (he/him)
- xiaoxiaojx - Natsu Xiao <[email protected]> (he/him)
- hai-x - Haijie Xie <[email protected]> (he/him)
This webpack repository is maintained by the Core Working Group.
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.
- CodSpeed for generously supporting us with benchmarks on their paid runners.
(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 of the desire for code splitting for modules such as 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.
- @sokra for creating webpack.
- Every early webpack user, which contributed to webpack by writing issues or PRs. You influenced the direction.
- All past and current webpack maintainers and collaborators.
- Everyone who has written a loader for webpack. You are the ecosystem...
- Everyone not mentioned here but that has also influenced webpack.