Suggestion: add ability to scope aliases

[OliverJAsh]

Feature request

What is motivation or use case for adding/changing the behavior?
We are using aliases to make our client-side code use the ES Modules version of Lodash (lodash-es)—so that we get tree shaking—whilst the server-side code continues to use the old CommonJS version of Lodash (lodash). (Node does not yet support ES Modules.)

resolve: {
  alias: {
    lodash: 'lodash-es'
  }
}

The downside to doing this is that aliases are applied globally, which means they will be applied to all modules including those inside node_modules (which could even need their own version of Lodash altogether).

This behaviour actually caused a bug in our application: gaearon/react-hot-loader#1269

How should this be implemented in your opinion?
It should be possible to scope aliases, just like you can with ES Modules’ import maps, e.g. this could look like:

resolve: {
  alias: {
    lodash: 'lodash-es',
  },
  scopes: {
    'node_modules': {
      lodash: 'lodash'
    }
  }
}

Are you willing to work on this yourself?
yes

[sokra]

You can put resolve options in rules. Example:

module.rules: [
  {
    include: path.resolve(__dirname, "src"),
    resolve: {
      alias: { lodash: "lodash-es" }
    }
  }
]

[OliverJAsh]

Thanks!