This library is part of the Aurelia platform and contains a Webpack plugin designed to enable proper Webpack bundling.

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Install with npm

npm install aurelia-webpack-plugin

Add the plugin to the webpack config file:

var AureliaWebpackPlugin = require('aurelia-webpack-plugin');
var webpackConfig = {
  entry: 'index.js',
  output: {
    path: 'dist',
    filename: 'index_bundle.js'
  },
  plugins: [new AureliaWebpackPlugin()]
}

The plugin accepts an options object with the following properties:

src

The directory where the app source files are located. Defaults to './src'.

root

The root project directory. Defaults to the directory from where webpack is called.

Module resource resolution is what makes Aurelia's Loader and Dependency Injection work. It's what translates require paths to places in the bundle or external files that are loaded asynchronously.

Some Aurelia modules or plugins have more than 1 file that need to be resolved (for example, when a plugin also contains an html template). By default, the whole src folder their static dependencies are loaded into the loader's context. If you wish to make resources available for dynamic use, you need to explicitly <require> them either in your .html resources or from the package.json file.

Since there are cases that cannot be supported by statically analyzing files (e.g. it is possible to generate require paths dynamically), there's an additional way to declare external dependencies, or in case of Aurelia plugins, to declare internal dependencies by listing those additional resources in the package.json file. Listing these dependencies in your package.json allows you include extra files in the bundles.

To see the ways resources can be declared inside package.json see the following example:

{
  ...
  "aurelia": {
    "build": {
      "resources": [
        // relative to your /src:
        "some-resource.js",
        "another.html",
        "items/another-without-extension",
        
        // make the file and its dependencies lazy-load from a separate bundle:
        { "path": "external-module/file.html", lazy: true, bundle: "some-bundle" },
        { "path": [], lazy: true, bundle: "some-bundle" },
        
        // include external resource (and its module's dependencies)
        "aurelia-templating-resources/compose"
        
        // include package (and its module's dependencies):
        "bootstrap"
      ],
      
      // you may also override package's root directory in case the file is located at a different place from either the child of main or module's root directory
      "moduleRootOverride": {
        "aurelia-templating-resources": "dist/es2015"
      }
    }
  }
}

The Webpack plugin will read that and know to include those files in the bundle.

It'll be intelligent enough to resolve any further dependencies that those files and modules then required statically (regardless if they are JavaScript files, modules with their own package.json declarations or additional HTML resources). As you can see in the example above, it is also possible to specify that certain files should be lazy-loaded or bundled separately (if the bundle is specified in the configuration file). To achieve the same directly from templates, add the parameters bundle="bundle-name" and/or lazy (for lazy-loading) to either the <require> tag or to <compose> tag, when composing with static names. E.g.:

<require from="./some-file.html" lazy bundle="other-bundle">

var path = require('path');
var AureliaWebpackPlugin = require('aurelia-webpack-plugin');
var webpackConfig = {
  entry: 'index.js',
  output: {
    path: 'dist',
    filename: 'index_bundle.js'
  },
  plugins: [
    new AureliaWebpackPlugin({
      src: path.resolve('./app')
    })
  ]
}

Plugins also can define build resources that are always loaded with your plugin. For those resources that are optional, it's recommended to instruct your users to declare those in the package.json of their app, so they don't unnecessairly bundle files they don't use.

In a plugin, the paths specified as build resources can be resolved as one of the following:

• relative to the root directory of the module
• relative to the parent directory of main (so that if your main is set to dist/index.js then you can specify relative to dist)
• let the user decide by overriding the root directory of your package, by adding a key-value pair alias as a key of aurelia.build.moduleRootOverride in their package.json, where the keyis the module/plugin name and value is the path, relative to root of the plugin
• SUBJECT TO CHANGE: specify a custom main which contains your code with JS modules (with import and exports) by additionally declaring an aurelia.main.native-modules entry in your plugin's package.json, and write resources relative to the parent directory of the file specified. We'll eventually want to standardize, when an official method of using modules in Node is decided upon. To support a similar main field for modules, support this proposal.