[neals]

I wanted to build something in Vue a few months ago. I really like the single-file-component thing. I also like the code to update automatically and my browser to refresh.

I decided on Webpack. First time using it and no idea where to get started. I ended up downloading some boilerplate webpack / vue / vueX that now does everything for me, but I have no idea what webpack is actually doing or how it is doing that. I'm not even sure how big this stack is... how big is my chain of dependencies here?

Am I going to be in trouble at some point? It feels like I'm on borrowed time here and my little house of cards will come tumbling down soon.

[breakingcups]

I'm in a similar boat right now, I started exploring Vue with the vue-cli default template and VS Code. Webpack and the associated npm ecosystem scares me to no end. When it works, it works wonderfully but it is so incredibly fragile and built upon assumptions that might change if you do not use the exact flavor of tools and utilities the creator of the template does.

For a long time, the way webpack worked in the Vue template was at least 70% black magic to me. I had some issues with it, sometimes I solved those issues after google-ing a lot and landing on completely unrelated projects Github issues for a fix. I never quite felt that I had mastered that whole ecosystem like I felt I had mastered my regular programmin languages and tools.

My day job is C# and my day IDE is VS2017. I've been given permission to explore doing a new application in .NET Core with Vue. So, I've started to translate the default template from vue-cli to Visual Studio and I have learned a LOT by trying to glue these pieces together that no one else seems to have glued together for me. Luckily, MS has done a lot of work to make React play nice with VS2017 and that seems to benefit Vue as well.

I'm not quite there yet, a few last issues remain. Most of them have to do with Intellisense's understanding of Typescript vs. Webpack's understandinf og Typescript. Some remain unsolvable for now (Single File Components using Typescript and SCSS).

Still, the point I'm trying to make is that being forced to read through the entire thing has increased my understanding of the Webpack process immensely. I feel like I'm at 80% mastery now.

[jbreckmckye]

I'm actually writing about this right now. I've worked with a lot of teams that have kicked off big, production-grade applications with boilerplates like Create-React-App. Your intuition is right: they get to prod having no idea how their buildchain works, and once something goes wrong they're stuck.

You really don't want your first time reasoning about your build process to be some kind of deployment disaster or production bug. And that's exactly what these tools are selling you.

[swsieber]

I found this link to be an enlightening tutorial on webpack:

https://what-problem-does-it-solve.com/webpack/intro.html