Just added an option disableDedupePlugin
to so you can disable it until they fix the bug. Most people shouldn’t use it but at least it’s there now if you need it.
Don’t spoil my secret project please… xD. I’ve literally started design phase on a new NPM package called webpacker
that will allow you to have sophisticated builds with little to no configuration. Something that will spit out complex webpack.config.js files with a simple package.json and webpack.json file. Maybe even detect your loaders/plugins in your devDependencies and set some default configs. This would come with a middleware you can plug on any Node.js server so you don’t need to mess with a damn webpack-dev-server.
The complexity of Webpack seems to be a real pain for most people that would easily trade a little bit of flexibility (not that much) for A LOT of simplicity. Anyone that would like to discuss, give feedback or even contribute, send my an email to benoit@thereactivestack.com
For Webpack 2, I’m waiting to learn more about it. There is some big things coming up that would REALLY help and I don’t see a lot of breaking changes. I’m certainly following this. If you have helpful links to learn more on that, let me know!
Meteor 1.3 brings you a lot of great things like real NPM support and ES2015 modules. However, Webpack brings way more. You can get hot moudle replacement with more than just React. You can get this working with any JavaScript library (I’m talking about that a little bit on my course on Meteor + Webpack on The Reactive Stack).
You can also bundle your assets with your code in a better way. As an example, you can import the CSS or images you need with your code and it will be automatically bundled with it. You don’t need to put everything in a dirty public folder ;).
You can also do code splitting. This means the code will not be loaded by the user until it hits the JavaScript code. This is useful for big applications or just if you want to hide the admin code form your regular users.
You can also do a bunch of stuff like TypeScript / CoffeeScipt or PostCSS/LESS/SASS. You can do that too with Meteor 1.3 but I feel like the integration is more fluent and easy with Webpack (maybe just my preference).
More and more people outside the React community are using Webpack because it is a great tool for ANY JavaScript developer.
You can learn about how to do code splitting on my course at The Reactive Stack. Because a project that do code splitting is not really different from a project without, I don’t feel like a kickstart is useful. I’m trying to do less kickstarters and more tutorials / examples. I feel like this is the way going forward.