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wpack.io - Modern JavaScript tooling for WordPress

What is wpack.io?

Put simply, wpack.io is a nodejs based build tool to ease up using modern javascript in WordPress Themes and Plugins. It gives a fine Developer Experience (DX) and a single dependency for all your bundling requirement.

It is a fine-tuned webpack/browser-sync configuration made specifically for WordPress Theme and Plugin Development.

With the rise of Gutenberg editor, the usage of modern JavaScript and libraries like react is imminent. The goal of this tooling is to:

✅ Provide out of the box compiling and bundling of all front-end assets.
✅ Give best in class Developer Experience (DX).
- Hot Module Replacement and Live Reload.
- Compile files on save.
- Work on any local development server.
✅ Support modern and useful concepts like modules, tree-shaking, dynamic import etc.

and eliminate the pain points such as:

❌ Boilerplate for setting up your project.
❌ Doing a lot of configuration to setup webpack.
❌ A lot of things to hook webpack with browsersync. We can not safely have webpack dev server because it doesn't reload for PHP files.
❌ A lot of dependencies like babel, webpack loaders and what not.

What is supported out of the box

👉 Have Create React App like developer experience for WordPress Plugin/Theme development.
👉 Consume all the modern packages from npm registry.
👉 Write javascript with modern ES2018 (ES6+) syntax and compile it down to ES5 (or in accordance to your .browserslistrc).
👉 Automatically minify and bundle code with webpack.
👉 Split large files automatically and have PHP library to wp_enqueue_script all generated parts.
👉 Use SASS/SCSS language to create stylesheets.
👉 Use postcss autoprefixer to automatically make your CSS work with needed vendor prefixes.
👉 Implement all the above to your existing wamp, mamp, vvv (basically any) dev server.
👉 Create production grade, super optimized and minified files with one command (hello CI).

Here are a few more bonus you get for using wpackio.

😎 Using ES6 Modules you will never run into namespace collision.

Remember when that third-party plugin was using that old version of foo library which caused your system to completely fail? No more!.
😎 Zero configuration for a sane default of all the tooling involved (babel, sass, webpack).
😎 Your CSS/SCSS changes will reflect instantly.
😎 Typescript and Flowtype to take your js carrier to the next level. This tooling itself is written in typescript 😉.
😎 All the stuff you need to start developing using react. Hello Gutenberg!

Getting Started

Everything is documented in our website.

TL;DR

Add @wpackio/scripts to a project by running this.
```
npx @wpackio/cli
```
and after that
```
npm run bootstrap
```
Edit the wpackio.project.js file to write your javascript entry-points.
Use wpackio/enqueue from composer to consume the assets.
Start the server using npm start.
Create production file using npm run build.

How wpack.io solves the problems?

Behind the scene wpack.io uses webpack along with browsersync.

It doesn't concern itself with providing boilerplate or starter templates. It assumes that you (the awesome developer 👨‍💻 || 👩‍💻) is already doing that and what you want is a simple to configure, yet hackable to the core tooling for bundling all your frontend assets (js, css, images, svgs) in the most optimized way and make it work within your WordPress theme or plugin.

Keeping that in mind, wpack.io provides three dependencies for your projects:

@wpackio/entrypoint - As main dependency of your package.json.
@wpackio/scripts - As main dev dependency of your package.json.
wpackio/enqueue - As main dependency of your composer.json.

The first handles all the tasks for building the assets and providing a damn good DX.

The second handles enqueuing the assets using WordPress' API (wp_enqueue_script and wp_enqueue_style).

Both the tools communicate with each other through the means of manifest.json file. The first tell the later which files to consume and the later publicPath to the first.

See it in action

We have examples inside examples directory of this repo. Each of them has instructions in the readme file, so be sure to check out.

`npx @wpackio/cli`

Add wpack.io into any existing or new project. This command has to be run from within the project.

`npm run bootstrap` / `yarn bootstrap`

Bootstrap needed dependencies, dev dependencies according to the type of your project. This command is enabled by npx @wpackio/cli.

Setup JS entry-points

Talking about example in plugins, we setup the entry-points in wpackio.project.js file.

module.exports = {
	// Project Identity
	appName: 'wpackplugin', // Unique name of your project
	type: 'plugin', // Plugin or theme
	slug: 'wpackio-plugin', // Plugin or Theme slug, basically the directory name under `wp-content/<themes|plugins>`
	// Used to generate banners on top of compiled stuff
	bannerConfig: {
		name: 'WordPress WebPack Bundler',
		author: 'Swashata Ghosh',
		license: 'GPL-3.0',
		link: 'https://wpack.io',
		version: '1.0.0',
		copyrightText:
			'This software is released under the GPL-3.0 License\nhttps://opensource.org/licenses/GPL-3.0',
		credit: true,
	},
	// Files we need to compile, and where to put
	files: [
		// App just for showing react
		{
			name: 'reactapp',
			entry: {
				main: ['./src/reactapp/index.jsx'],
			},
		},
	],
	// Output path relative to the context directory
	// We need relative path here, else, we can not map to publicPath
	outputPath: 'dist',
	// Project specific config
	// Needs react?
	hasReact: true,
	// Needs sass?
	hasSass: true,
	// Externals
	externals: {
		jquery: 'jQuery',
	},
	// Webpack Aliases
	alias: undefined,
	// Show overlay on development
	errorOverlay: true,
	// Auto optimization by webpack
	// Split all common chunks with default config
	// <https://webpack.js.org/plugins/split-chunks-plugin/#optimization-splitchunks>
	// Won't hurt because we use PHP to automate loading
	optimizeSplitChunks: true,
	// Usually PHP and other files to watch and reload when changed
	watch: 'inc/**/*.php',
	// Hook into babeloverride so that we can add react-hot-loader plugin
	jsBabelOverride: defaults => ({
		...defaults,
		plugins: ['react-hot-loader/babel'],
	}),
};

Setup PHP Library to consume build files

Now we do

composer require wpackio/enqueue

to install PHP Consumer Library. We instruct it to load files the right way (using WordPress APIs like wp_enqueue_script and wp_enqueue_style).

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: WPackIo Sample
Plugin URI: https://wpack.io
Description: A sample to demonstrate wpackio
Version: 0.1.0
Author: Swashata Ghosh
Author URI: https://swas.io
Text Domain: wpack-io
Domain Path: /languages
*/
// Assuming this is the main plugin file.

// Require the composer autoload for getting conflict-free access to enqueue
require_once __DIR__ . '/vendor/autoload.php';

// Do stuff through this plugin
class MyPluginInit {
	/**
	 * @var \WPackio\Enqueue
	 */
	public $enqueue;

	public function __construct() {
		// It is important that we init the Enqueue class right at the plugin/theme load time
		$this->enqueue = new \WPackio\Enqueue( 'wpackplugin', 'dist', '1.0.0', 'plugin', __FILE__ );
		// Enqueue a few of our entry points
		add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', [ $this, 'plugin_enqueue' ] );
	}


	public function plugin_enqueue() {
		// Enqueue the `main` entry from `reactapp` file entry.
		$this->enqueue->enqueue( 'reactapp', 'main', [] );
	}
}


// Init
new MyPluginInit();

`npm start` / `yarn start`

After configuring all entry-points and using the PHP library for consuming, we start the development server.

HMR

We edit the files and with proper setup, we can see things load live, without page refresh. It is called, Hot Module Replacement (HMR).

In the above image we see, we are changing the label of from Todo App to Awesome todo. The changes are reflected live on the page, without any page-reload.