Loaders and Plugins

Abstract

Loaders and plugins are the heart of webpack. They make up the engine that empowers webpack to do the “magical” things for you, like reading and transforming files before passing them to webpack or influencing the output of your bundle by extending the compiler capability, etc. In this chapter, we will be exploring some of the most commonly used loaders and plugins. We will go through examples of how to transpile files from one format to another. We will see how to debug our JavaScript efficiently and how to handle images and optimize them as well as our bundle for fast loading. By the end of this chapter, you will have the necessary understanding of how to use both loaders and plugins in the simplest possible way.