Let’s install both: npm install -save-dev css-loader style-loader Of the two, css-loader transforms CSS to a JavaScript module, and style-loader injects the CSS that’s exported by the JavaScript module into a tag at runtime. This will install webpack and the webpack CLI and add them to the devDependency section of your package.json file: 'devDependencies' : Īs you can see, I’ve specified two loaders: css-loader and style-loader. We can do this with the following command: npm install webpack webpack-cli -save-dev The next thing we’ll need to do is to install webpack. If you need help with any of the steps above, why not head over to our forums and post a question. This will install jQuery, plus Slick Slider and Lightbox2 - two plugins we’ll be using on the site - to a node_modules folder in the root of the project.Īfter that, you can open index.html in your browser and navigate the site. To get it running on your machine, you should clone the project from GitHub and install the dependencies: git clone We’ll also need a skeleton project to work with. Personally, I much prefer this second method, as it allows you to switch between multiple versions of Node and it negates a bunch of permissions errors, which might otherwise see you installing Node packages with admin rights. If you haven’t got Node yet, you can either download it from the Node website, or you can download and install it with the aid of a version manager. The first thing you’ll need is to have Node and npm installed on your computer. Whether or not you employ any of these techniques in your own projects is down to you, but by following along you’ll get a firm understanding of what webpack does, how it does it and whether it’s a good fit for you. This means you can write JavaScript using the latest, most up-to-date syntax (although this might not be fully supported yet), then serve the browsers ES5 that will run almost everywhere.Īnd finally, it’s a fun learning exercise. For example, in this article I’ll demonstrate how to have webpack transpile modern JavaScript to ES5. Webpack also makes it easy to minify your code, further reducing its size, and it lets you write your assets in whatever flavor you desire. Bundling your code can go some way to mitigating this problem. If you’re making a network request for each of these assets, things soon add up and your page can become sluggish. As the average web page grows, you’ll likely include jQuery (yes, it’s still popular in 2020), a couple of fonts, a few plugins, as well as various style sheets and some JavaScript of your own. One of the reasons for doing this is to minimize the number of HTTP requests you make to the server.

Do i have to install webpack globally