Packer vs Webpack

Overview

Packer

Stacks573

Followers566

Votes41

Webpack

Stacks45.0K

Followers28.1K

Votes752

GitHub Stars65.7K

Forks9.2K

Packer vs Webpack: What are the differences?

Developers describe Packer as "Create identical machine images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration". Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images. On the other hand, Webpack is detailed as "A bundler for javascript and friends". A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.

Packer and Webpack are primarily classified as "Infrastructure Build" and "JS Build Tools / JS Task Runners" tools respectively.

"Cross platform builds" is the primary reason why developers consider Packer over the competitors, whereas "Most powerful bundler" was stated as the key factor in picking Webpack.

Packer and Webpack are both open source tools. It seems that Webpack with 49.8K GitHub stars and 6.27K forks on GitHub has more adoption than Packer with 9.1K GitHub stars and 2.47K GitHub forks.

Airbnb, Instagram, and Pinterest are some of the popular companies that use Webpack, whereas Packer is used by Instacart, Oscar Health, and Razorpay. Webpack has a broader approval, being mentioned in 2209 company stacks & 1342 developers stacks; compared to Packer, which is listed in 115 company stacks and 21 developer stacks.

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CLI (Node.js)

Manual

Advice on Packer, Webpack

Aleksandr

Contract Software Engineer - Microsoft at Microsoft-365

Dec 23, 2019

Decided

Why migrated?

I could define the next points why we have to migrate:

Decrease build time of our application. (It was the main cause).
Also jspm install takes much more time than npm install.
Many config files for SystemJS and JSPM. For Webpack you can use just one main config file, and you can use some separate config files for specific builds using inheritance and merge them.

301k views301k

Comments

Abigail

Dec 10, 2019

Decided

We mostly use rollup to publish package onto NPM. For most all other use cases, we use the Meteor build tool (probably 99% of the time) for publishing packages. If you're using Node on FHIR you probably won't need to know rollup, unless you are somehow working on helping us publish front end user interface components using FHIR. That being said, we have been migrating away from Atmosphere package manager towards NPM. As we continue to migrate away, we may publish other NPM packages using rollup.

224k views224k

Comments

Detailed Comparison

Packer	Webpack
Packer automates the creation of any type of machine image. It embraces modern configuration management by encouraging you to use automated scripts to install and configure the software within your Packer-made images.	A bundler for javascript and friends. Packs many modules into a few bundled assets. Code Splitting allows to load parts for the application on demand. Through "loaders" modules can be CommonJs, AMD, ES6 modules, CSS, Images, JSON, Coffeescript, LESS, ... and your custom stuff.
Super fast infrastructure deployment. Packer images allow you to launch completely provisioned and configured machines in seconds, rather than several minutes or hours.;Multi-provider portability. Because Packer creates identical images for multiple platforms, you can run production in AWS, staging/QA in a private cloud like OpenStack, and development in desktop virtualization solutions such as VMware or VirtualBox.;Improved stability. Packer installs and configures all the software for a machine at the time the image is built. If there are bugs in these scripts, they'll be caught early, rather than several minutes after a machine is launched.;Greater testability. After a machine image is built, that machine image can be quickly launched and smoke tested to verify that things appear to be working. If they are, you can be confident that any other machines launched from that image will function properly.	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
Statistics
GitHub Stars -	GitHub Stars 65.7K
GitHub Forks -	GitHub Forks 9.2K
Stacks 573	Stacks 45.0K
Followers 566	Followers 28.1K
Votes 41	Votes 752
Pros & Cons
Pros 27 Cross platform builds 8 Vm creation automation 4 Bake in security 1 Good documentation 1 Easy to use	Pros 309 Most powerful bundler 182 Built-in dev server with livereload 142 Can handle all types of assets 87 Easy configuration 22 Laravel-mix Cons 15 Hard to configure 5 No clear direction 2 SystemJS integration is quite lackluster 2 Spaghetti-Code out of the box 2 Fire and Forget mentality of Core-Developers
Integrations
Amazon EC2 DigitalOcean Docker Google Compute Engine OpenStack VirtualBox	JavaScript

What are some alternatives to Packer, Webpack?

gulp

Build system automating tasks: minification and copying of all JavaScript files, static images. More capable of watching files to automatically rerun the task when a file changes.

Grunt

The less work you have to do when performing repetitive tasks like minification, compilation, unit testing, linting, etc, the easier your job becomes. After you've configured it, a task runner can do most of that mundane work for you—and your team—with basically zero effort.

AWS CloudFormation

You can use AWS CloudFormation’s sample templates or create your own templates to describe the AWS resources, and any associated dependencies or runtime parameters, required to run your application. You don’t need to figure out the order in which AWS services need to be provisioned or the subtleties of how to make those dependencies work.

Brunch

Brunch is an assembler for HTML5 applications. It's agnostic to frameworks, libraries, programming, stylesheet & templating languages and backend technology.

Scalr

Scalr is a remote state & operations backend for Terraform with access controls, policy as code, and many quality of life features.

Pulumi

Pulumi is a cloud development platform that makes creating cloud programs easy and productive. Skip the YAML and just write code. Pulumi is multi-language, multi-cloud and fully extensible in both its engine and ecosystem of packages.

Parcel

Parcel is a web application bundler, differentiated by its developer experience. It offers blazing fast performance utilizing multicore processing, and requires zero configuration.

rollup

It is a module bundler for JavaScript which compiles small pieces of code into something larger and more complex, such as a library or application. It uses the new standardized format for code modules included in the ES6 revision of JavaScript, instead of previous idiosyncratic solutions such as CommonJS and AMD.

Backpack

Backpack is minimalistic build system for Node.js. Inspired by Facebook's create-react-app, Zeit's Next.js, and Remy's Nodemon, Backpack lets you create modern Node.js apps and services with zero configuration. Backpack handles all the file-watching, live-reloading, transpiling, and bundling, so you don't have to.

Vite

It is an opinionated web dev build tool that serves your code via native ES Module imports during dev and bundles it with Rollup for production.

Related Comparisons

"Cross platform builds" is the primary reason why developers consider Packer over the competitors, whereas "Most powerful bundler" was stated as the key factor in picking Webpack.

Packer vs Webpack