Modern Front-End Development for Rails

Understanding Why webpack Exists

I find it a little hard to get my head around what webpack is actually supposed to be doing, in part because webpack is abstract—it’s a mechanism to perform various transformations on your code without making strong claims about what transformations you should do. I don’t think it helps much that webpack’s official description of itself throws around jargony terms like “static module bundler.”

Instead, I find it easier to discuss what problems webpack and its related tools are solving for us. As far as our Rails app is concerned, we’re juggling three pieces of software that solve related problems for our client-side code: Yarn, webpack, and Webpacker.

The problem Yarn is designed to solve is: “What version of ...