Webpacker in Production & Customizing Webpacker

Webpacker in Production

Deploying Webpacker to production or staging is similar to deploying previous Rails asset tools. Webpacker creates a Rake task, webpacker:compile, which is made part of the existing Rake task, assets:precompile. This task is likely part of our existing deployment script.

If we start a new project without an existing asset pipeline, we can still use assets:precompile for compatibility with older build tools. It’s essentially an alias to webpacker:compile. The compilation uses the RAILS_ENV value to determine which version of the Webpacker configuration to load.

Customizing Webpacker

Webpacker provides great defaults for webpack, but defaults aren’t always enough; we may still need to customize.

One way to customize Webpacker is to change the settings in the config/webpacker.yml file. We can’t add new settings to this file, but we can change the defaults that are already there, including the input and output paths, ...