How to load image files with webpack file-loader

Question

I am using webpack to manage a reactjs project. I want to load images in javascript by webpack file-loader. Below is the

Answer 1

Regarding problem #1

Once you have the file-loader configured in the webpack.config, whenever you use import/require it tests the path against all loaders, and in case there is a match it passes the contents through that loader. In your case, it matched

{
    test: /\.(jpe?g|png|gif|svg)$/i, 
    loader: "file-loader?name=/public/icons/[name].[ext]"
}

and therefore you see the image emitted to

dist/public/icons/imageview_item_normal.png

which is the wanted behavior.

The reason you are also getting the hash file name, is because you are adding an additional inline file-loader. You are importing the image as:

'file!../../public/icons/imageview_item_normal.png'.

Prefixing with file!, passes the file into the file-loader again, and this time it doesn't have the name configuration.

So your import should really just be:

import img from '../../public/icons/imageview_item_normal.png'

Update

As noted by @cgatian, if you actually want to use an inline file-loader, ignoring the webpack global configuration, you can prefix the import with two exclamation marks (!!):

import '!!file!../../public/icons/imageview_item_normal.png'.

Regarding problem #2

After importing the png, the img variable only holds the path the file-loader "knows about", which is public/icons/[name].[ext] (aka "file-loader? name=/public/icons/[name].[ext]"). Your output dir "dist" is unknown. You could solve this in two ways:

1. Run all your code under the "dist" folder
2. Add publicPath property to your output config, that points to your output directory (in your case ./dist).

Example:

output: {
  path: PATHS.build,
  filename: 'app.bundle.js',
  publicPath: PATHS.build
},