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airpack

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airpack is a wrapper for webpack-cli. Designed to allow you to use webpack more elegantly.

When airpack loads the webpack-cli module on the node, it adds functional enhancement patches to webpack-cli. This patch allows webpack-cli to automatically read webpack configurations from multiple locations (project dependencies, project directories, command line parameters) in a certain priority order, and then merge these webpack configurations in a more appropriate way.

There are many benefits to using webpack configuration in this way:

The project directory will be cleaner, with only project-related logic, no .babelrc.*, postcss.config.js, .eslintrc.*,..., and even webpack.config.* is not needed. Project templated will be more convenient. See react-webpack-playground.
With fewer devDependencies, the length of the dependency list is shortened from one arm to one finger, and all dependencies related to webpack configuration are placed in a separate webpack-config-* package.
Using a separate webpack-config-* package is easier to manage, version control and iteration will be more convenient, and it will also facilitate sharing. It is more appropriate to publish the package under your own or organization's name, such as @arzyu/webpack-config-web. Complex configurations can also be split into multiple packages, and airpack can help you merge them.

Installation

npm add --save-dev airpack

Usage & How it works

# view help
$(npm bin)/airpack --help

Usage: airpack [options] [other-webpack-options]

Options:
  -s, --server                    Run webpack-dev-server
  -c, --config <file|package...>  Specify webpack configs (default: [])
  --no-autoconfig                 Only load webpack configs from '-c, --config ...' option
  --print                         Print webpack configs with paths, without running webpack
  -v, --version                   Print airpack version
  -h, --help                      Print this help

Taking the webpack configuration @arzyu/webpack-config-web as an example, package.json should look like this:

{
  "scripts": {
    "dev": "NODE_ENV=development airpack --server",
    "build": "NODE_ENV=production airpack"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@arzyu/webpack-config-web": "^0.1.3",
    "airpack": "^1.0.1",
    "webpack": "^5.33.2",
    "webpack-cli": "^4.7.2",
    "webpack-dev-server": "^3.11.2"
  },
}

npm run dev, start local development service (invoke webpack serve)
npm run build, run packaging (invoke webpack)

Configuration file search order and priority

When using airpack without specifying the --no-autoconfig parameter, it will help us automatically collect the webpack configuration. The logical sequence is as follows:

Find all webpack-config-* items in the project's dependencies and add them to the end of the configuration list
If there is a webpack.config.* file in the project root directory, the one recognized by webpack as the default configuration will be appended to the end of the configuration list
If there are webpack configuration files or packages imported with airpack -c, --config, add them to the end of the configuration list in turn

In the configuration list, the lower configuration has a higher priority and will overwrite the items in the previous configuration when merging.

In the above example, if we run airpack -c file-a.js -c package-b -c package-c/internal, we may get a configuration list like this:

[
  "@arzyu/webpack-config-web",
  "webpack.config.js",
  "file-a.js",
  "package-b",
  "package-c/internal"
]

Note: airpack -c package-c/internal is a way of introducing configuration, which allows you to include multiple webpack configurations in one package. In a typical scenario, for example, when doing electron-related development, you can make a webpack-config-electron package. In this package, write two configurations, webpack-config-eletron/main and webpack-config-eletron/renderer.

If you don't want airpack to automatically collect the webpack configuration, you can use the --no-autoconfig parameter, which must be used with the -c, --config parameter to manually specify the configuration file.

airpack --no-autoconfig -c config-a -c config-b

In this way, the final webpack configuration list is ["config-a", "config-b"].

Configuration file merge logic

After collecting the list of webpack configurations, we need to perform a merge operation on these configurations.

Although webpack-cli provides the --merge parameter to implement the function of merging configuration, the way of merging configuration is simply to merge all configurations into one object, so that webpack's multi-configuration function cannot be used. Therefore, airpack rewrite the merge logic, only merge the configuration objects with the same name attribute, and merge the configuration objects without the name attribute into all other configuration objects. The specific steps are as follows.

Suppose we have collected such a configuration list content:

[
  { "a": "from a", "x": "override by a" },
  { "b": "from b", "x": "override by b", name: "group_1" },
  { "c": "from c", "x": "override by c", name: "group_2" },
  { "d": "from d", "x": "override by d" },
  { "e": "from e", "x": "override by e", name: "group_1" },
]

Step 1. Group all configuration objects according to the name attribute, and keep the priority order in the group:

{
  "undefined": [
    { "a": "from a", "x": "override by a" },
    { "d": "from d", "x": "override by d" }
  ],
  "group_1": [
    { "b": "from b", "x": "override by b", "name": "group_1" },
    { "e": "from e", "x": "override by e", "name": "group_1" }
  ],
  "group_2": [
    { "c": "from c", "x": "override by c", "name": "group_2" }
  ]
}

Step 2. Merge each group separately:

{
  "undefined": {
    "a": "from a",
    "d": "from d",
    "x": "override by d"
  },
  "group_1": {
    "b": "from b",
    "e": "from e",
    "x": "override by e",
    "name": "group_1"
  },
  "group_2": {
    "c": "from c",
    "x": "override by c",
    "name": "group_2"
  }
}

Step 3. Combine the undefined group without the name attribute with other groups respectively to get the final webpack configuration:

[
  {
    "a": "from a",
    "d": "from d",
    "b": "from b",
    "e": "from e",
    "x": "override by e",
    "name": "group_1"
  },
  {
    "a": "from a",
    "d": "from d",
    "c": "from c",
    "x": "override by c",
    "name": "group_2"
  }
]

Note: If all configuration objects in the configuration list do not have a name attribute, all configuration objects will be merged into one object, which is the same as the merge logic of webpack-cli.