How To Build Minified And Uncompressed Bundle With Webpack

Are you looking to optimize your website's performance by creating both minified and uncompressed bundles using Webpack? In this guide, I'll walk you through the step-by-step process to help you achieve this efficiently.

First things first, let's define what minified and uncompressed bundles are. Minification involves removing unnecessary characters from your code to reduce its size, making it faster to load. On the other hand, uncompressed bundles contain human-readable code with proper formatting and comments, which are helpful for debugging.

To get started, you'll need to have Node.js and npm (Node Package Manager) installed on your system. If you haven't already, head over to the Node.js website to download and install the latest version.

Once you have Node.js set up, open your terminal and create a new directory for your project. Navigate into your project directory and run the following command to initialize a new npm project:

npm init -y

Next, install Webpack and its necessary plugins by running:

npm install webpack webpack-cli webpack-dev-server --save-dev

Now, create a new file named `webpack.config.js` in the root of your project directory. This file will contain the configuration for Webpack. Here's a basic configuration setup to create both minified and uncompressed bundles:

const path = require('path');

module.exports = {
  entry: './src/index.js',
  output: {
    path: path.resolve(__dirname, 'dist'),
    filename: 'bundle.min.js',
  },
  plugins: [
    new MiniCssExtractPlugin({
      filename: 'bundle.css',
    }),
  ],
};

In this configuration, we specify the entry point of our application (`src/index.js`) and the output directory (`dist`). The `filename` property determines the name of our bundled JavaScript file. To generate an uncompressed bundle, you can remove the `.min` suffix from the filename.

To run Webpack and build your bundles, add the following scripts to your `package.json` file:

"scripts": {
  "build": "webpack --mode production",
  "start": "webpack serve --mode development --open"
}

Now, you can run the following command to generate your bundles:

npm run build

After running the build script, you'll find your minified and uncompressed bundles in the `dist` directory. The minified bundle will have a `.min.js` extension, while the uncompressed bundle will have a `.js` extension.

Lastly, to serve your application locally during development, use the following command:

npm start

With this setup, you'll be able to efficiently create both minified and uncompressed bundles using Webpack, optimizing your website's performance while maintaining readability for debugging purposes. Experiment with different configurations and plugins to further enhance your workflow and improve your project's efficiency. Happy coding!