A guide for Webpacker?

rubyonrails-core
1

Despite my protestations I’m seen as A Rails Expert within my organisation. And I’ve been fielding a ton of questions re. JS asset management, due to the switch to Webpacker.

Webpack is tremendously powerful and Webpacker is a helpful manager and wrapper. However, Webpack itself is also a Heath Robinson machine and trying to configure/debug it in many common cases immediately becomes a voyage into the arcane.

Neither of these Rails Guides currently make any mention of Webpack or Webpacker: The Asset Pipeline - The Asset Pipeline — Ruby on Rails Guides Working with JavaScript in Rails - Working with JavaScript in Rails — Ruby on Rails Guides

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that they should both deal with relevant aspects.

The 6.0 upgrade guide (Upgrading Ruby on Rails — Ruby on Rails Guides) makes it seem that an upgrade is as simple as adding a gem and running a task, but for many existing applications it will be very far from trivial.

None of this is meant to detract from what’s already there - the Webpacker gem itself has many useful docs and a pretty good README, but they’re mostly written from a different perspective to that of a guide. In particular there’s often assumption of familiarity with Webpack, and many docs are thorough references rather than introductory guides.

For all I know there may be a new guide in progress, but I couldn’t see a PR or issue. It’s something I’d be interested in at contributing to, if only for the selfish reason of reducing my own burden.

2 Likes
2

Hello Josh, I’m from the webpack side of the equation.

It’s something I’d be interested in at contributing to, if only for the selfish reason of reducing my own burden.

A PR would greatly be appreciated! Here are some off-the-cuff topics that I see coming up often on the issue tracker:

  • “I already know what my webpack.js exports need to be, how do I convert that to webpackER?”
  • “Webpacker comes with node sass but I need to use dart sass”
  • :star: How package.json (unintuitively) acts differently than a gemfile (and how it can ruin your day)
  • “I need to use webpack-dev-server to deploy my stuff” (don’t do this)
  • :star:Misunderstandings about what should be in a “pack”. Users who make every individual js file a new pack will find that every pack can come at an expediential cost performance/size/buildtime depending on how much library code is duplicated.
  • How does json/data from server to packed js
  • NODE_ENV vs RAILS_ENV
  • When to use a file.js.erb and when to use a filePack.js (and how those communicate with each other)
  • There are times where you need to ignore install instructions from JS library READMEs Hope this is helpful for a potential guide. If you have any questions feel free to email.
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Have there been any updates on this? A guide to implementing webpack in rails would be quite useful!

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A guide has been added Webpacker — Ruby on Rails Guides