Webpack for back-end?

Question

I was just wondering, I started using Webpack for a new project and so far it\'s working fine. I almost would say I like it better than Grunt, which I used before. But now I

Answer 1

There's only a couple of aspects I can redeem the need to use webpack for backend code.

ES modules (import)

import has only experimental support in node (at least since node 8 up to 15). But you don't need to use webpack for them work in node. Just use esm which is very lightweight and has no build step.

Linting

Just use eslint, no need to use webpack.

Hot reloading/restart

You can use nodemon for this. It's not hot reloading but I think it's way easier to deal with. I wished I could refer to a more lightweight project than nodemon, but it does do the trick.

---

The blog post you shared (which is dated by now) uses webpack for having hot reloading. I think that's an overkill, opens a can of worms because now you have to deal with webpack config issues and hot reloading can also lead to unexpected behaviour.

The benefits we get from using tools like webpack on the frontend don't really translate to backend.

The other reasons why we bundle files in frontend is so browsers can download them in an optimal way, in optimal chunks, with cache busting, minified. There's no need for any of these in the backend.

Old (and terrible, but maybe useful) answer

You can use webpack-node-externals, from the readme:

npm install webpack-node-externals --save-dev

In your webpack.config.js:

var nodeExternals = require('webpack-node-externals');

module.exports = {
    ...
    target: 'node', // in order to ignore built-in modules like path, fs, etc.
    externals: [nodeExternals()], // in order to ignore all modules in node_modules folder
    ...
};