DEPRECATED: All the related functionalities have been integrated and maintained within the es-pack-js repository.

es6-esm-boilerplate

Build ES modules from ES6 source code with Webpack.

Starting with this boilerplate, we can develop simple-to-complex ES Modules targeting the latest browsers, development with Babel, and Node runtime. At the same time, the ES5-compatible build is also generated for convenience.

Why we do this?

This module building pattern shines especially when we deal with the NPM module ecosystem. Webpack can bundle any NPM dependencies listed in package.json regardless of their module types. So, with Webpack, we can expose any combination of existing NPM packages wrapped as an ES module; and we can consume them by simply import-ing the ES module while keeping our code base ES6-based.

Input/output structure

es6-esm-boilerplate
├── package.json
├── webpack.config.js
├── src                         # ES6 source code
│   ├── Base.js                 # class 
│   ├── Foo.js                  # subclass of Base
│   ├── Bar.js                  # subclass of Base
│   ├── index.js                # module implementation (export { Foo, Bar })
│
├── lib                         # ES module output
│   ├── my-module.js            # esm
│   ├── my-module.min.js        # esm minified
│   ├── my-module.compat.js     # esm with ES5-compatibility
│   ├── my-module.compat.min.js # esm with ES5-compatibility minified

How it works

ES6 source code          -> var-module             -> my-module.js (export default MyModule;)
{Base,Foo,Bar,index}.js     (var MyModule = ...;)  -> my-module.compat.js (UMD)

First, bundle ES6 source code into a var-module. Then, export the var-module using the ES Module's export syntax to finally get my-module.js. This module file can be directly consumed on relatively new browsers.

We also build my-module.compat.js for compatibility with older browsers, development with Babel, and NodeJS. This module output conforms to the UMD patterns that provide the script-tag loading, Node-require, and AMD compatibilities.

All the "var-to-esm transformation" is performed by a tiny Webpack plugin called webpack-var2esm-plugin.

Demo

• examples/latest-browsers (source code)
• examples/babel (source code)
• examples/script-tag (source code)
• examples/amd (source code)

Build

# git clone and cd to this repo, then
$ npm install  # set up build tools
$ npm run build  # get ES module output in lib/ by Babel