Piped Webpack

webpack as a Gulp plugin.

Why?

Why Gulp?

Webpack already function as a great build tool, and in many cases you don't even need Gulp.

Combining Gulp with webpack, however, allow you to do many more things without writing webpack plugins:

• Separate CSS workflow that does not go into the bundle (eg. for non-SPA apps)
• Mangle other type of assets with the vast collection of Gulp plugins
• Run webpack output through Gulp plugins

Why not webpack-stream?

At TipMe we started out with webpack-stream. However, we found that it doesn't work with DllPlugin (#149). So we set out to create a new implementation:

• Webpack is now on peerDependencies, so you can use any version you wanted without passing the instance.
• Dump memory-fs to stream directly, so all output files will always be discovered
• No unnecessary config mangling:
  • We don't set output for you, make sure that your output.path is not set or set to process.cwd()
  • We don't add any plugins for you (webpack-stream can add ProgressPlugin). If you want any plugin you can add them manually.
• Extensible class-based design
• Use webpack's watch system for performance

The reason we name this as piped-webpack is because webpack-stream also appear as gulp-webpack on npm.

Migrating from webpack-stream is simple: just change your require to piped-webpack and, if you're passing webpack instance, remove it. Also remove callback argument if you're using it. We'll implement something later.

Usage

Install this module from npm:

npm install --save-dev piped-webpack

Pipe your entrypoint files to piped-webpack:

const gulp = require('gulp');
const pipedWebpack = require('piped-webpack');
 
gulp.task('webpack', function(){
    return gulp.src(['js/entry1.js', 'js/entry2.js'])
        .pipe(pipedWebpack({
            // your webpack config
        }))
        .pipe(gulp.dest(__dirname + '/static/'));
});

In the above case, the webpack config can omit the entry object.

If you already have entry set, you can pipe an empty stream to pipedWebpack:

gulp.src([])
    .pipe(pipedWebpack({
        entry: {
            // your entrypoints
        },
        // your webpack config
    }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(__dirname + '/static/'));

Note that due to webpack's limitation we don't actually use the files from stream, only path. Therefore, don't pipe anything else but gulp.src into this plugin.

Tips

Additional entries

If you need to use load something in your entrypoints (eg. babel-polyfill) you can use additionalEntries option:

const gulp = require('gulp');
const pipedWebpack = require('piped-webpack');
 
gulp.task('webpack', function(){
    return gulp.src(['js/entry1.js', 'js/entry2.js'])
        .pipe(pipedWebpack({
            // your webpack config
            additionalEntries: ['babel-polyfill'],
        }))
        .pipe(gulp.dest(__dirname + '/static/'));

You can also specify a function that returns an array. The function will receive Vinyl file object as argument.

Submit source maps to Sentry

Here's how we submit source maps to Sentry, and removing it from production servers

const gulp = require('gulp');
const filter = require('gulp-filter');
const sentryRelease = require('gulp-sentry-release');
const merge = require('merge-stream');
const pipedWebpack = require('piped-webpack');
 
const SENTRY_URL = 'https://app.getsentry.com/api/0/projects/mycompany/myapp/';
const SENTRY_API_KEY = 'apikeygoeshere'; // see gulp-sentry-release docs on how to get this key
 
const webpackConfig = {
    // ...
    // sentry requires that your source map have a visible comment
    devtool: 'source-map',
};
 
gulp.task('webpack', function(){
    // filter out source maps
    let mapFilter = filter(['**', '!**/*.map'], {restore: true, passthrough: false});
 
    let codeStream = gulp.src(['*/js/*.js', '!static/**'])
        .pipe(pipedWebpack(webpackConfig))
        .pipe(mapFilter) // remove all map files
        .pipe(gulp.dest(__dirname + '/static/'));
 
    let mapStream = mapFilter.restore
        .pipe(sentryRelease({
            API_URL: SENTRY_URL,
            API_KEY: SENTRY_API_KEY,
            DOMAIN: '~',
            version: '1.0.0', // you can use git-rev to update this automatically
        }).release());
 
    return merge(codeStream, mapStream);
});

Watching

Set watch: true in your configuration to use webpack's watch system. This can be done like this:

gulp.task('webpack', function(){
    // invoke your webpack normally
});
gulp.task('watch', function(){
    webpackConfig.watch = true;
    gulp.start('webpack');
});

License

piped-webpack is licensed under the MIT License