Switching from Gulp to Webpack

Question

UPDATE 30.04.20

[ Moving to Webpack ]

My first question is about how recommended is this switch for simple projects, just to Pre-Process/Concat/Minify?

Understanding this future "standards", like Webpack in together with PostCss-NextCss-Autoprefixer, etc. is like obsessing me....

So this leads to my next question , is there any tutorial that will guide to simple tasks like the one I told in my first question?

Or is an easy way to change my gulpfile.js to a webpack-config.js

My normal tasks in gulp are not the best practices but work well :

//load plugins
var gulp    = require('gulp'),
runSequence = require('run-sequence'),
sass        = require('gulp-ruby-sass'),
compass     = require('gulp-compass'),
rev         = require('gulp-rev'),
revDel      = require('rev-del'),
del         = require('del'),
minifycss   = require('gulp-minify-css'),
uglify      = require('gulp-uglify'),
rename      = require('gulp-rename'),
concat      = require('gulp-concat'),
notify      = require('gulp-notify'),
plumber     = require('gulp-plumber'),
watch       = require('gulp-watch'),
path        = require('path');


  //the title and icon that will be used for the Grunt notifications
  var notifyInfo = {
    title: 'Gulp',
    icon: path.join(__dirname, 'gulp.png')
  };

  //error notification settings for plumber
  var plumberErrorHandler = { errorHandler: notify.onError({
    title: notifyInfo.title,
    icon: notifyInfo.icon,
    message: "Error: <%= error.message %>"
  })
};

//patches
var paths = {
  scriptsAbs : '_coffeescript/',
  stylesAbs: '_scss/',
  scriptsCom : '_coffeescript/' + '**/*.js',
  stylesCom :'_scss/' + '**/*.scss',
  cssCom : 'resources/css',
  jsCom : 'resources/js',
  imgCom : 'resources/img'
};

gulp.task('clean',
  function (cb) {
    del([
      paths.cssCom + '/*',
      paths.jsCom + '/*'
      ], cb);
  });

//styles
gulp.task('styles',
  function() {
    return gulp.src(paths.stylesCom)
    .pipe(plumber(plumberErrorHandler))
    .pipe(compass({
      sass: '_scss',
      css: paths.cssCom,
      image: paths.imgCom,
      style: 'expanded',
      relative: true,
      require: ['normalize-scss', 'susy']
    }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(paths.cssCom))
    .pipe(rename({ suffix: '.min' }))
    .pipe(minifycss())
    .pipe(gulp.dest(paths.cssCom))
    .pipe(rev())
    .pipe(gulp.dest(paths.cssCom))
    .pipe(rev.manifest())
    .pipe(revDel({ dest: paths.cssCom }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(paths.cssCom))
    .pipe(notify({ message: 'Styles task completed' }))
  });

//scripts
gulp.task('scripts',
  function() {
    return gulp.src(paths.scriptsCom)
    .pipe(plumber(plumberErrorHandler))
    .pipe(concat('main.js'))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(paths.jsCom))
    .pipe(rename({ suffix: '.min' }))
    .pipe(uglify())
    .pipe(gulp.dest(paths.jsCom))
    .pipe(rev())
    .pipe(gulp.dest(paths.jsCom))
    .pipe(rev.manifest())
    .pipe(revDel({ dest: paths.jsCom }))
    .pipe(gulp.dest(paths.jsCom))
    .pipe(notify({ message: 'Scripts Concatenated completed' }))
  // .pipe(reload({stream:true}));

});


gulp.task('default', ['clean','styles','scripts'], function(){
  gulp.watch(paths.stylesCom, ['styles'])
  gulp.watch(paths.scriptsCom, ['scripts'])

//watch .php files
// gulp.watch(['*.php'], ['bs-reload'])
});

And I'm starting to use postcss that is making my workflow, mm, better..easier sometimes.

What are your opinions on all this? Where is the right path to start?

EDIT // JUNE 28, 2017

At this date our progress with Webpack 1 were super satisfactory and successfully , our workflow is pretty much faster and our dependence in this tool is Unchangeable.

This is the webpack.config.js that we use every day:

"use strict";

var webpack = require('webpack');
var glob = require('glob-all');
var ExtractTextPlugin = require("extract-text-webpack-plugin");
var BrowserSyncPlugin = require('browser-sync-webpack-plugin');

let start = {

    entry: {
        scripts: glob.sync(
            [
            './_javascript/*.js',
            './_cssnext/*.pcss'
            ]
        )},

    output: {
        path: './resources/js',
        filename: 'bundle--[name].js'
    },
    watchOptions: {
        poll: true
    },

    postcss: function (webpack) {
        return [
            require("postcss-import")({addDependencyTo: webpack}),
            require("postcss-url")(),
            require("precss")(),
            require("postcss-cssnext")(),
            require('postcss-font-magician')(),
            require("postcss-reporter")(),
            require("postcss-browser-reporter")(),
            require('postcss-inline-svg')(),
            require('postcss-urlrev')(),
            require('postcss-fontpath')(),
            require('postcss-object-fit-images')()
        ]
    },

    module: {
        loaders: [
            {
                test: /\.jsx?$/,
                loader: 'babel-loader'
            },
            {
                test: /\.p?css$/,
                loader: ExtractTextPlugin.extract(
                    'style-loader',
                    'css-loader!postcss-loader'
                )
            }
        ]
    },


    plugins: [
        new webpack.optimize.CommonsChunkPlugin({name: 'scripts', filename: 'bundle--[name].js'}),
        new webpack.optimize.UglifyJsPlugin({
            compress: {
                warnings: false
            }
        }),
        new ExtractTextPlugin("../css/bundle--styles.css"),
        new BrowserSyncPlugin({
            host: 'localhost',
            port: 3000,
            proxy: 'localhost:8002',
            browser: 'google chrome',
            ghostMode: false
        })
    ]

};

module.exports = start;

But times has change and is time to evolve to Webpack 3 , and now we are in the progress to change this webpack.config.jsto the version 3

Answer 1

For simple projects, I would not recommend the switch at all. In the end it's a personal taste I think, and I prefer postprocessing through easily understandable javascript (gulp).

As you've said in your question, your current setup works well: so why fix something that's not broken? I'd focus on refactoring your gulp code to make it a bit more readable, split the long functions into smaller gulp tasks.

In the end, using webpack requires learning a lot of specific webpack related config options, while with gulp you're mostly just piping vanilla js commands.