Modern Front-End Development for Rails

Running webpack

Rails offers three ways to compile your webpack packs:

• Running bin/webpack from the command line
• Compiling automatically from the Rails development server
• Running bin/webpack-dev-server to automatically compile when files are changed

Rails provides bin/webpack, which is just a command-line interface to running the webpack compiler. You can run this at any time, and webpack will output files to (by default) /public/packs.

Rerunning webpack manually all the time is something of a pain, so Rails will do it for you in development. By default, if Rails encounters a pack_tag helper and there are changed files in the pack, Rails will automatically rerun webpack before rendering the page. That works, but it can be slow, especially if ...