Beginner’s guide to Webpack

Nader Dabit
JavaScript Training
9 min readSep 7, 2015

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Or what I wish I knew when starting with Wepback.

Click here to go to the final Github repo.
We are using Webpack 1.x. Webpack 2 will not work with this tutorial. Click
here to view the Webpack changelog.

Webpack is the latest and greatest in front-end development tools. It is a module bundler that works great with the most modern of front-end workflows including Babel, ReactJS, CommonJS, among others. As a beginner to Webpack, this is what I have learned.

This tutorial has been updated to use Babel 6

Getting Started

Webpack Conventions

  1. Webpack works best with NPM, not Bower
  2. Uses a module system (AMD, CommonJS, ES6)

Installing Webpack globally:

npm install webpack -g

The most basic of builds:

In your root directory create 2 files: index.html & app.js

In app.js:

document.write('welcome to my app');console.log('app loaded');

In index.html:

<html>
<body>
<script src="bundle.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

Open your console, and run:

webpack ./app.js bundle.js

The above command uses the webpack command (webpack) to reference our app file (./app.js) and…

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Nader Dabit
JavaScript Training

Full Stack Product Engineer, Author, Teacher, Director of Developer Relations at Avara