Here’s a brief comparison between webpack and Snowpack and a step-by-step guide to getting started with Snowpack.
webpack has been a developer favorite for years because of its effective module bundling capabilities. However, 2019 saw the introduction of Snowpack, a lighter alternative to webpack that promised increased speed and ease of use. This article will walk you through a brief comparison between these two tools and provide a step-by-step guide to getting started with Snowpack.
Since its initial release in 2012, webpack has gained widespread recognition as an essential tool for web development. Webpack is a module bundler that takes a large number of JavaScript files and transforms them into a single output file or a few smaller files that you can use to run your app.
Webpack creates a dependency graph that manages the dependency relationships between your modules. With the addition of loaders, the tool can also bundle other file types besides JavaScript, such as CSS, PNG, JPG, and more. This effectively allows you to add all of your static assets — along with your JavaScript — to the dependency graph, which saves you the extra effort it takes to manage each dependency manually.
Other benefits of webpack include:
But the powerful complexity of webpack also comes with some drawbacks:
Introduced in 2019, Snowpack is a new-generation, front-end build tool for JavaScript applications. Compared to webpack, Snowpack is faster, more lightweight, and much easier to configure for beginners.
Unlike webpack, Snowpack doesn’t need to go through an entire rebuild and re-bundle process every time you modify and save an asset file. Webpack’s time-intensive build process accounts for the delay you experience between saving your files and seeing your changes load in the browser. A few developers have even reported wait times as long as 12 minutes for larger apps.
Some people have devised clever workarounds for boosting the speed of webpack, such as upgrading the UglifyJsPlugin, jettisoning image loaders, rethinking caching strategies, and switching from node-sass to sass-loader, to name a few.
For those who can’t afford to take days out of your project schedule to analyze build performance and cobble together an optimization plan, Snowpack is a better option.
So what’s different about Snowpack? It uses JavaScript’s ES module system (ESM) to write your file changes directly and instantly to the browser with no wait time. As opposed to bundlers like webpack, Snowpack builds every one of your files once and then caches them. It only needs to rebuild a file when you make changes, and the rebuild happens for that single file only.
Snowpack lets you work in a lightning-fast, unbundled development environment and even lets you keep your final builds unbundled and runnable. You also have the option to support bundled builds when it comes time to roll your app out to production. All you have to do is add the right plugin for your favorite bundler, or even write your own using the Snowpack plugin API.
In short, Snowpack offers the following advantages over a traditional bundler tool like webpack:
To learn more about how Snowpack stacks up against webpack, check out our blog post.
You’ve done the research, you’ve compared the tools, and you’ve decided that Snowpack is the one for you. So how do you get started? Luckily, you’ve come to the right place.
In the rest of this article, we’ll guide you through the steps to migrate your development environment and get your app up and running with Snowpack.
Before you begin, check to ensure you have what you need to complete the setup. Thankfully, Snowpack’s requirements are minimal. To develop with the tool, you need:
Tip: The modern browser requirement applies only to your development environment. Once you’ve created your final build with Snowpack and pushed it to production, users can view your site in any browser, modern or legacy.
You can use these installation commands:
With npm:
id="globalinstallation">global installation
npm install -g snowpack
local installation per project
npm install --save-dev snowpack
Snowpack’s creators recommend that you install locally rather than globally when possible.
With yarn:
local installation per project
yarn add --dev snowpack
There are three ways that you can run the Snowpack CLI locally:
root package.json
filenpx snowpack
yarn snowpack
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