Webpack unable to find babel-loader - reactjs

Question

I'm having a bit of trouble adding react to a legacy application. While I found plenty of materials on getting started, I ran into a bunch of issues related to my particular configuration and exacerbated by my utter lack of webpack knowledge (so much time relying on react cli tools makes one lax).
My configuration:
./docs/jslib = my node_modules, that's where yarn installs modules
./docs/jscripts = my general js folder, various js scripts go there
./docs/jscripts/mini = my dist folder, some things get built/packed by gulp and end up here. This is where the built things are expected to go
./docs/jscripts/react(/react.js) = my desired root for react things, where the react.js is the entrypoint for DOM selection and rendering (at least for the first attempt).
My webpack config:
const path = require("path");
module.exports = {
entry: "./docs/jscript/react/react.js",
output: {
path: path.resolve(__dirname, "./docs/jscript/mini"),
filename: "react.js"
},
resolve: {
extensions: [".js", ".jsx"],
modules: [
path.resolve(__dirname, "./docs/jslib")
],
alias: {
'babel-loader': path.resolve(__dirname, "./docs/jslib/babel-loader")
}
},
module: {
rules: [
{
test: /\.(js|jsx)$/,
include: [
path.resolve(__dirname, "./docs/jscript/react")
],
exclude: [
path.resolve(__dirname, "./docs/jslib")
],
use: {
loader: "babel-loader"
}
}
]
}
};
The error I get on running webpack:
yarn run v1.21.1
$ ./docs/jslib/babel-loader/node_modules/.bin/webpack --mode production
Insufficient number of arguments or no entry found.
Alternatively, run 'webpack(-cli) --help' for usage info.
Hash: 210250af48f3cf84fa4a
Version: webpack 4.41.6
Time: 75ms
Built at: 02/14/2020 9:23:09 AM
ERROR in Entry module not found: Error: Can't resolve 'babel-loader' in '/var/www/html'
I have webpack-cli, I can run webpack straight, I can run it from the modules bin folder, it's all the same problem - it can't find babel-loader even though babel-loader brings its own webpack script which I use, so the loader is obviously there in the "node_modules" that's actually on a different path.
From what I gathered, all I had to do was to add my custom node_modules path to the webpack config under the resolve settings, which has solved my initial errors related to packages not found (yet webpack still can't find the loader).
Note: if I symlink my ./docs/jslib as ./node_modules, it works as expected.
Is there something I'm missing?
Thanks!

Answer 1

After some digging, I found a solution and some details that other might want to keep in mind when configuring webpack in a rather non-standard context:
resolve: points to modules that are directly required in various scripts
resolveLoader: should point to the same, for the purpose of accessing loaders (which is what I needed)
Solution:
resolveLoader: {
extensions: ['.js', '.json', '.jsx'],
modules: [
path.resolve(__dirname, "./docs/jslib")
],
mainFields: ['loader', 'main']
}