Webpack should compile different JS files

[paganotoni]

Under some situations as a developer you want to have different JS for different pages in your application, this can be for multiple reasons, the reasons I've faced are:

• You don't want to load unneeded libraries on every page
• You don't want to expose some JS functionality in public pages
• You want to have your JS logic separated

As a solution Buffalo could have webpack compile every file on the /assets/js folder into its fingerprinted version inside /public/assets and in order to avoid partial files, we could exclude files that start with an underscore or another pattern we decide.

Changes to make this possible would be done in the generated webpack.config.js.

[markbates]

Love it. I would use _file.js for partials to match plush and sass.

[paganotoni]

Great! it seems that for our sass files it's the same story, we're only generating application.css, should we include in this issue doing the same with sass (i can see almost the same reasons to separate your style).

[markbates]

I assumed you meant both. :) Definitely!

[stanislas-m]

@paganotoni How about this? https://github.com/webpack/webpack/tree/master/examples/multiple-entry-points

[paganotoni]

@stanislas-m #849

[markbates]

@paganotoni I started working on a new application and found out that this is causing some problems.

Everything works fine, but when I change, say application.js it cleans out the old application.hash.js file, but never rebuilds it and updates the manifest.json. This results in a lot of these types of errors:

could not find assets/application.7cf2e05554e16f6c5e3c.js

The only way to fix the problem is to restart buffalo dev.

This either needs to be fixed before we release 0.11.0 or it needs to be reverted.

[paganotoni]

@markbates when are we planning to release 0.11.0 ? I want to commit to have this in 0.11.0

[markbates]

right now February 12th

[paganotoni]

In that case let’s have it in 0.11.0

[paganotoni]

@markbates this issue seems not to be caused by this particular feature, anyways I'm working on it, I changed my webpack configuration to be the old one and it still happens when you change a file and save it multiple times quickly, it kind of loses contact with the assets folder and webpack stops recompiling.

There is another issue with the fonts that I've added in #821.

I continued looking into the config and seems the culprit is the CleanWebpackPlugin configuration we're using, by disabling the watch property this seems to be fixed, I'm preparing a PR for this and #821 soon.