I created an application using create react app, then I did the npm run eject command and I get a list of all dependencies. Yes, I do not have webpack config files, which will be if I create my own webpack. I see only one advantage that create react app adds extra dependencies that are not needed. All other settings, as I understand it, I can add the cra application to my own webpack. Can you please tell me why it is so important to create your own webpack? I just don't see much difference between builds. I have read a lot of articles and have not found objectively strong advantages can you tell me
I am trying to migrate Angular.js app to the hybrid one. The code was really old so at first I changed all the controllers to the components and I would like to introduce Webpack for Angular.js now before I will use ng-upgrade tool.
I already installed webpack, created a config file but I am looking through some tutorials and they are working with export modules. The app we are changing is quite big so is there any way I could have Webpack but without exporting angular.js modules as es6 modules? Do I need to change all dependency into the import statements?
Yes. You will have to convert all that into import statements, though it does not require ES6-Modules (we chose CommonJS modules).
When we migrated our huge AngularJS App (bower, TypeScript, global namespaces) to webpack we also necessarily had to do the step of packing everything to exported modules and migrate from bower to npm.
However, the whole change was less effort than we feared before, and we never regretted our decision. :-)
I'm starting journey with React and have a very important question for me : as I'm not familiar with Webpack can I add it later - after I finish my project? Won't it cause any problems in file structure and so on ?
You could add webpack once your project is complete, but this isn't really good practice.
Webpack allows you to work in ways which would not be possible without such a tool. Webpack does lots of things, but most of the things which it does are useful when you're developing code, not once you're done developing. If you were to do add webpack once you've finished your project, you would have set up your code in a way which doesn't take advantage of webpack.
For React, webpack makes it easy to split your components into multiple files, and it allows you to transform files containing jsx.
Webpack can be a pain to configure, but there are options to make your life easier, like create-react-app. Alternatively, parcel has a lot of the functionality of webpack, without the config.
I'm looking into creating an app with typescript and angular 1.6.0. But everywhere I look is using webpack, babel, grunt, gulp, there is no single consensus on which is the best way to proceed with an app like this.
Anyone got any hints?
Thank you.
Do you have a specific need for using angular 1.6.0? As opposed to creating an angular2 project?
You can get more information here: Angular-cli
Angular cli currently includes webpack and you will not need to use gulp or grunt at all. In addition to the angular cli bundling your app together it allows easy build for Ahead of Time Compilation and tree shaking. Having these two features is nice for when you are ready to deploy your application to a production server you can bundle the application into a small package and serve a small amount of JS files.
Using the angular cli also helps you to code with best practices within an angular2 application. You generate new components/directives/pipes with a simple ng generate [component] [name] command.
I would strongly suggest reading through the angular quickstart for ts guide located here: Angular-Quickstart
Also, if you do not want to generate your own projects using the angular-cli. There are various templates online that you can start your application with.
Good luck!
If you are planning to start from scratch, then why not Angular2 ?
My suggestion is Typescript2 + Angular2 with webpack. As stated by #Andy Angular-cli is good to go.
I'm trying to set up a client-side app workflow with yeoman (http://yeoman.io/), and as I'm coming from Rails background, I'm used to the niceties of the asset pipeline, which is backed by Sprockets (https://github.com/sstephenson/sprockets).
I'm struggling to make all the parts play nice with each other, and already spent a few hours trying to figure it out.
The first question that comes to mind is, is there a well established (e.g. convention over configuration, like in Rails world) way of developing a client side application with yeoman? Some definitive guide (besides the basic webapp-generator guide), perhaps?
Some suggest using requirejs (which I rather not use, because while it simplifies things in development, I'll need to jump through hoops to package the app (e.g. use Almond.js or AMDclean.js, or incur the unneeded overhead of requirejs).
My setup is:
Coffeescript, Backbone + Marionette, Handlebars for templates and ZURB Foundation with SASS.
What I'd like to accomplish in the end is the following setup, while using bower for managing the 3rd party dependencies:
In development:
Have something like Rails' manifest for javascript, so I can declare the order of dependencies, which will exploded into the the index.html
For all .scss files a .css entry added to index.html
Each file watched and compiled when needed
In production (dist):
All .scss files compiled, minified and concatenated to app.css
All bower files concatenated and minified to vendor.js
All application coffeescript files compiled, minified and concatenated to app.js
All templates compiled, minified and and concatenated to templates.js
index.html modified to include only those four files.
Is there something like this setup available?
I'm also open for suggestions and/or other alternative workflows.
Yeomam won't get you as close to a Rails workflow as you might expect. My two cents is that you take a look at something like Middleman has it does what you want out of the box.
Yeoman way
Using generators
You can use Yeoman generators and try to find out the combination of generators that will better suit the stack you are looking for, from what you describe I might take a look at:
webapp
backbone
maryo
At this point most of your requirements (both development and production) would be fulfilled:
a well defined project structure
compile coffeeScript and .scss
watch and compile
generators for model, view, collection, ...
compile and minify all files for production
You can use multiple generators to customise your own stack, every time that Yeoman detects that a generator overwrites a existing file it will prompt what to do, and you should be able to manage the conflict by yourself. Some framework-generators will obviously clash (it wouldn't make sense to try to use a angular generator on top of backbone).
Fine tuning
You can use sub-generators to scaffold more specific parts of your app, see Addy Osmani video.
Building generators
If you feel limited by some of the choices that a generator might impose (e.g. you prefer browserify instead of requirejs) you might want to fork a generator and add that as an option. You can even build a generator form scratch that will build your custom stack!
Grunt and Bower way
Yeoman is build on top of this two, but you can opt out at any moment and build your own stack using this two. You can add your dependencies through bower, and your tasks using grunt. There are plenty of examples that can give you some guidance, you could start with Yeoman webapp. There are also good examples at github like juanghurtado/puppeteer.
There are 3 files that you must keep an eye:
package.json — all you node dependencies go in here
bower.json — to manage the client dependencies
Gruntfile.js — here you define the tasks
Wrapping up
Maybe I'm stating the obvious but Yeoman does some magic work and helps you managing Grunt and bower, this magic only happens when you fully understand how this 2 work. So I would recommend that first you dive into some code and fully understand how Grunt and Bower work, and then you may use Yeoman magic.
Some other tools
You asked for some suggestions, here it goes:
gulp.js An alternative to Grunt. More you dive into Grunt more you will want Gulp (IMHO).
browserify An alternative to Requiere. Read this
assemble Static site generator for Node.js, Grunt.js, and Yeoman
Roman,
Answer for your first question, here is a guide on how to use Yeoman: http://code.tutsplus.com/tutorials/building-apps-with-the-yeoman-workflow--net-33254
If you want to use coffeescript by default, just pass the --coffee param
yo webapp --coffee
handling the assets order you can handle from the index.html file.
When you want to get the app ready for production just type the
grunt build
that will unify and minify all of your assets and throw it all dist folder.
To customise what you have in the build process you would have to write your own or customise the grunt build task, so that it will do exactly what you want.
Hope i gave you some useful information :)
Not an answer to my original question, but rather a pointer for someone who'd like to implement the same workflow I was looking for. I ended up writing a custom Gruntfile, using the grunt-injector to do the "explode the assets to the index.html" part, grunt-bower-install to add bower assets and configuring the grunt-usemin, grunt-contrib-concat, grunt-contrib-cssmin and grunt-contrib-uglify accordingly.