Overview

Webpack

Stacks41.6K

Followers28.1K

Votes752

GitHub Stars65.7K

Forks9.2K

Webpacker

Stacks123

Followers48

Votes0

GitHub Stars5.3K

Forks1.5K

Webpack vs Webpacker: What are the differences?

Introduction

Webpack and Webpacker are both popular JavaScript bundlers used in web development. While they serve a similar purpose, there are key differences between the two.

Architecture: Webpack is a standalone module bundler for JavaScript applications, allowing developers to create a dependency graph and package their code into a single or multiple bundles. On the other hand, Webpacker is a gem that integrates Webpack into Ruby on Rails applications, providing a streamlined process for using Webpack in Rails projects.
Configuration: Webpack offers a more flexible configuration setup, allowing developers to define custom loaders, plugins, and other build-related settings in a dedicated configuration file, typically named webpack.config.js. Webpacker, on the other hand, simplifies the configuration process by using convention over configuration. It sets up a default configuration file that handles common use cases automatically, reducing the need for explicit configuration.
Asset Pipeline Integration: Webpacker is designed to work specifically with Ruby on Rails' asset pipeline. It integrates seamlessly with the pipeline, allowing developers to compile and manage JavaScript assets within the Rails application structure. Webpack, on the other hand, is language-agnostic and can be used with any web framework or project that requires JavaScript bundling.
Hot Module Replacement (HMR): Webpack comes with built-in support for Hot Module Replacement, a feature that allows modules to be updated without requiring a full page reload during development. It provides a smoother development experience by instantly reflecting changes in the browser. Webpacker also supports HMR, but as a Rails-specific feature, it requires additional configuration to set up.
Development Environment: Webpack offers a standalone development server, allowing developers to run their applications locally during development. This server provides features like live reloading, hot module replacement, and an easy way to test and debug web applications. Webpacker, being integrated into the Rails ecosystem, leverages the existing development server provided by Rails, making it more aligned with the Rails development workflow.
Plugins and Loaders: Webpack supports a vast ecosystem of plugins and loaders contributed by the community, offering a wide range of functionality to extend its core capabilities. Additionally, developers have the flexibility to define and use their own custom plugins and loaders. Webpacker, although built on top of Webpack, may have limited compatibility with certain Webpack plugins and loaders due to differences in configuration and integration.

In summary, Webpack is a highly customizable standalone bundler suitable for various web projects, while Webpacker is a Rails-specific integration of Webpack that simplifies the configuration and asset management process within the Ruby on Rails ecosystem.

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Advice on Webpack, Webpacker

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

Rob

Tech Lead at Runa

Mar 15, 2021

Decided

The developer experience Webpack gave us was not delighting anyone. It works and is stable and consistent. It is also slow and frustrating. We decided to check out Vite as an alternative when moving to Vue 3 and have been amazed. It is very early in development and there are plenty of rough edges, but it has been a breath of fresh air not waiting for anything to update. It is so fast we have found ourselves using devtools in browser less because changing styles is just as fast in code. We felt confident using the tool because although it is early in its development, the production build is still provided by Rollup which is a mature tool. We also felt optimistic that as good as it is right now, it will only continue to get better, as it is being worked on very actively. So far we are really happy with the choice.

55.7k views55.7k

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

Webpack	Webpacker
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.	Webpacker makes it easy to use the JavaScript preprocessor and bundler Webpack to manage application-like JavaScript in Rails. It coexists with the asset pipeline, as the purpose is only to use Webpack for app-like JavaScript, not images, css, or even JavaScript Sprinkles (that all continues to live in app/assets).
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 65.7K	GitHub Stars 5.3K
GitHub Forks 9.2K	GitHub Forks 1.5K
Stacks 41.6K	Stacks 123
Followers 28.1K	Followers 48
Votes 752	Votes 0
Pros & Cons
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 Spaghetti-Code out of the box 2 Loader architecture is quite a mess (unreliable/buggy) 2 SystemJS integration is quite lackluster	No community feedback yet
Integrations
JavaScript	Rails

What are some alternatives to Webpack, Webpacker?

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.

Brunch

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

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.

Pingy CLI

Gulp and Grunt and other heavyweight build tools are great for complicated build workflows. Sometimes you want something simpler that doesn't take lots of configuration to get up and running. That's Pingy CLI.

System.js

It is a Universal Module Loader for JavaScript. If you've used RequireJs or a CommonJs bundler in the past, you have probably created modules.Configurable module loader enabling dynamic ES module workflows in browsers and NodeJS.