In this guide we'll dive into some of the best practices and utilities for building a production site or application.
This walkthrough stems from Tree Shaking and Development. Please ensure you are familiar with the concepts/setup introduced in those guides before continuing on.
The goals of development and production builds differ greatly. In development, we want strong source mapping and a localhost server with live reloading or hot module replacement. In production, our goals shift to a focus on minified bundles, lighter weight source maps, and optimized assets to improve load time. With this logical separation at hand, we typically recommend writing separate webpack configurations for each environment.
While we will separate the production and development specific bits out, note that we'll still maintain a "common" configuration to keep things DRY. In order to merge these configurations together, we'll use a utility called webpack-merge
. With the "common" configuration in place, we won't have to duplicate code within the environment-specific configurations.
Let's start by installing webpack-merge
and splitting out the bits we've already worked on in previous guides:
npm install --save-dev webpack-merge
project
webpack-demo |- package.json - |- webpack.config.js + |- webpack.common.js + |- webpack.dev.js + |- webpack.prod.js |- /dist |- /src |- index.js |- math.js |- /node_modules
webpack.common.js
+ const path = require('path'); + const CleanWebpackPlugin = require('clean-webpack-plugin'); + const HtmlWebpackPlugin = require('html-webpack-plugin'); + + module.exports = { + entry: { + app: './src/index.js' + }, + plugins: [ + new CleanWebpackPlugin(['dist']), + new HtmlWebpackPlugin({ + title: 'Production' + }) + ], + output: { + filename: '[name].bundle.js', + path: path.resolve(__dirname, 'dist') + } + };
webpack.dev.js
+ const merge = require('webpack-merge'); + const common = require('./webpack.common.js'); + + module.exports = merge(common, { + mode: 'development', + devtool: 'inline-source-map', + devServer: { + contentBase: './dist' + } + });
webpack.prod.js
+ const merge = require('webpack-merge'); + const common = require('./webpack.common.js'); + + module.exports = merge(common, { + mode: 'production', + });
In webpack.common.js
, we now have setup our entry
and output
configuration and we've included any plugins that are required for both environments. In webpack.dev.js
, we've set mode
to development
. Also, we've added the recommended devtool
for that environment (strong source mapping), as well as our simple devServer
configuration. Finally, in webpack.prod.js
,mode
is set to production
which loads UglifyJSPlugin
which was first introduced by the tree shaking guide.
Note the use of merge()
in the environment-specific configurations to easily include our common configuration in dev
and prod
. The webpack-merge
tool offers a variety of advanced features for merging but for our use case we won't need any of that.
Now let's repoint our scripts
to the new configurations. We'll use the development one for our webpack-dev-server
, npm start
, script and the production one for our npm run build
script:
package.json
{ "name": "development", "version": "1.0.0", "description": "", "main": "webpack.config.js", "scripts": { - "start": "webpack-dev-server --open", + "start": "webpack-dev-server --open --config webpack.dev.js", - "build": "webpack" + "build": "webpack --config webpack.prod.js" }, "keywords": [], "author": "", "license": "ISC", "devDependencies": { "clean-webpack-plugin": "^0.1.17", "css-loader": "^0.28.4", "csv-loader": "^2.1.1", "express": "^4.15.3", "file-loader": "^0.11.2", "html-webpack-plugin": "^2.29.0", "style-loader": "^0.18.2", "webpack": "^3.0.0", "webpack-dev-middleware": "^1.12.0", "webpack-dev-server": "^2.9.1", "webpack-merge": "^4.1.0", "xml-loader": "^1.2.1" } }
Feel free to run those scripts and see how the output changes as we continue adding to our production configuration.
Many libraries will key off the process.env.NODE_ENV
variable to determine what should be included in the library. For example, when not in production some libraries may add additional logging and testing to make debugging easier. However, with process.env.NODE_ENV === 'production'
they might drop or add significant portions of code to optimize how things run for your actual users. Since webpack v4, specifying mode
automatically configures DefinePlugin
for you:
webpack.prod.js
const merge = require('webpack-merge'); const common = require('./webpack.common.js'); module.exports = merge(common, { mode: 'production', devtool: 'source-map' });
Technically,NODE_ENV
is a system environment variable that Node.js exposes into running scripts. It is used by convention to determine dev-vs-prod behavior by server tools, build scripts, and client-side libraries. Contrary to expectations,process.env.NODE_ENV
is not set to"production"
within the build scriptwebpack.config.js
, see #2537. Thus, conditionals likeprocess.env.NODE_ENV === 'production' ? '[name].[hash].bundle.js' : '[name].bundle.js'
within webpack configurations do not work as expected.
If you're using a library like react
, you should actually see a significant drop in bundle size after adding this plugin. Also note that any of our local /src
code can key off of this as well, so the following check would be valid:
src/index.js
import { cube } from './math.js'; + + if (process.env.NODE_ENV !== 'production') { + console.log('Looks like we are in development mode!'); + } function component() { var element = document.createElement('pre'); element.innerHTML = [ 'Hello webpack!', '5 cubed is equal to ' + cube(5) ].join('\n\n'); return element; } document.body.appendChild(component());
webpack v4+ will minify your code by default in production mode
.
Note that while the UglifyJSPlugin
is a great place to start for minification and being used by default, there are other options out there. Here are a few more popular ones:
If you decide to try another minification plugin, just make sure your new choice also drops dead code as described in the tree shaking guide and provide it as the optimization.minimizer
.
We encourage you to have source maps enabled in production, as they are useful for debugging as well as running benchmark tests. That said, you should choose one with a fairly quick build speed that's recommended for production use (see devtool
). For this guide, we'll use the source-map
option in production as opposed to the inline-source-map
we used in development:
webpack.prod.js
const merge = require('webpack-merge'); const common = require('./webpack.common.js'); module.exports = merge(common, { mode: 'production', + devtool: 'source-map' });
Avoidinline-***
andeval-***
use in production as they can increase bundle size and reduce the overall performance.
It is crucial to minimize your CSS on production, please see Minimizing for Production section.
Some of what has been described above is also achievable via the command line. For example, the --optimize-minimize
flag will include the UglifyJSPlugin
behind the scenes. The --define process.env.NODE_ENV="'production'"
will do the same for the DefinePlugin
instance described above. And, webpack -p
will automatically invoke both those flags and thus the plugins to be included.
While these short hand methods are nice, we usually recommend just using the configuration as it's better to understand exactly what is being done for you in both cases. The configuration also gives you more control on fine tuning other options within both plugins.
© JS Foundation and other contributors
Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0.
https://webpack.js.org/guides/production