webpack-to-memory

A quick 'n dirty module to compile one or more bundles using webpack and load those compiled bundles as node modules -- all in memory!

Usage

This module exports a single function which takes a webpack compiler configured according to the webpack Node Node API (note: you can ignore the section on compiling to memory, this module takes care of that for you). The most important things to configure are the target ('node') and the libraryTarget ('commonjs2'). The exported function returns a Promise which resolves with an object mapping output filenames to compiled node modules.

const webpack = require('webpack');
const load = require('webpack-to-memory');
 
load(webpack({
  entry: 'index.js',
  target: 'node',
  output: {
    libraryTarget: 'commonjs2',
    filename: 'bar.js',
  },
  module: {
    loaders: [{
      test: /\.js$/,
      loaders: ['babel'],
    }],
  },
})).then(files => {
  // Now you can get the node modules.
  const bar = files['bar.js']; // `bar` now contains the `exports` object from `bar.js`
});

Caveats

All output is placed in an in-memory filesystem. Node doesn't read from this filesystem directly, so if you create multiple bundles that depend on each other your modules will fail to load (except in a few edge cases). If you have a setup such as this it is probably better to just compile out to the real filesystem ahead of time and require or import the modules as normal.

License

MIT