Develop Reference

Where to install webpack using client/server folder structure

Im building a React Nodejs web application and Im trying to understand how to bundle the frontend with webpack. [
This is my project structure
Where should I install webpack and configure webpack.config.js? Most of the project structures I have seen put the frontend folder inside the backend folder, also in some projects they also bundle the backend separately. Can someone give me an explanation on where to implement it with this folder structure? I'm really confused
This article was kind of getting to the point but didnt solve my question

Webpack should be part of the frontend repository, so it should go into the frontend/package.json. Similarly, just like frontend/eslintrc.json is your linting settings for your frontend, you should create a frontend/webpack.config.js for your frontend webpack config.
Since you're in VSCode, it looks like, when dealing with just the frontend, you could consider making things easier on yourself by going to File -> Open Folder -> select the Frontend folder, and then you can easily operate on it, its package, and everything it contains (without getting mixed up with the backend at all).
Where your frontend folder goes is up to you, but your current approach is fine - organizing to have a /frontend and a separate /backend folder in the same parent directory if you wish.

Other way to share react ts components between projects

I have been looking for a way to mostly share some code between projects specifically for SPFX and fluent ui. We found 3 main ways to do that.
1.
Creating a component library is the way that seemed least complicated cause it uses the same infrastructure and do all building without the need to configure it.
But this adds some issues, we need to built and manually link the solution locally to make it work, this will also work if we put in a repo. so this is mitigated.
The second is that implicitly this will also require the fluent ui and react. Plus having to place it inside a SPFX component library project.
2.
I saw some promise using paths in ts and this works fine while using the ts compiler. It will go to the folder that your proj is referring and build it at calling time. which is great. But it did not work in SPFX.
3.
Another way was to have a post install to sync the folders which seems easy enough but I wonder how practical this is plus how people are doing it, if they are, how.
All I wanted to figure out now is a way to take my component code and share as if they were in a folder of my src or a simple extension of the code. No need to have extra dependencies or build steps, just the code that can be used as a ts/tsx file. ex:
shared lib:
//assuming I have react and fluentui already installed for the project.
import button from 'fluentui';
export const fancyCustomButtom = (props) => {
return (<Button text="Standard" />);
};
src project folder:
import {fancyCustomButtom} from 'shared-lib'
It is fine if it needs to build the files before we can use it but can we do it at build time or when the package is installed? also wouldn't it increase my bundle size by making both module dependent on things already available (react, fluentui)?

Given the way Microsoft have architected the loading of bundles in SharePoint and Teams - I believe an SPFX component library is the best way to share code between different solutions, particularly if you are looking to minimise bundle size...
Imagine you have a library for something re-usable: a form, a set of standard branded components - something of that nature. You could put your shared code in repos and add references to it - either by publishing your own repo publicly or using the npm install git+https://yourUrl syntax; but what effectively happens there is that your code is pulled down in to node_modules for each project, and any referenced module code is included in your bundles. If you have two, three, four or more webparts on the same page - using those same libraries, you're multiplying how many times that code is included on the page.
If you follow Microsoft's guide on setting up a component library project however, your npm link commands allow your types to be recognised in consuming projects without needing to actually include the bundled distribution code. You can deploy your library code once to the App Catalog, and if it's referenced in other solutions -- it's loaded on pages as needed: once.
I have found the development experience to be quite flaky at times, but it does work. When I run gulp clean on my library code, or come back to it after some time, I sometimes find that I need to run npm link and npm link my-project-name again as per the instructions in the above tutorial. Whenever you run gulp build on your library, you should also rebuild the project that consumes the library, either by using gulp build / bundle or by saving a file (if you're running gulp serve). This process works well for developing, and once it comes time to deploy, all you need to do is add a named reference to your library inside package.json and then deploy both .sppkg files to your App Catalog.
In terms of your last question re: bundle size - react is not actually included in the dependencies for an SPFX library project, but you will find it's available to use. When you build your library, if you take a look in the generated javascript in your dist folder, you will see it's listed as one of the dependencies for the webpacked content along with react-dom and ControlStrings. It's on line 1.
office-ui-fabric-react is included as a devDependency thanks to the #microsoft/sp-webpart-workbench package that gets scaffolded with all SPFX projects - and if you check your library's dist javascript, you will see that included components are being webpacked and included in your bundle. I'm not entirely sure if when you pull this code in to your consuming project, whether webpack then tree-shakes to de-duplicate and ensures only necessary code is included: I don't know. Someone else may be able to illuminate us there or provide a more accurate explanation of what's going on... I will update this response if anyone comments to let me know.
And finally, this is more of a personal way of working, but it may be worth consideration:
When developing a library, I sometimes reference it in other projects via a local npm install ../filepath command. This ensures that when I install the library as described, the consuming project installs any necessary dependencies. I'm able to tweak both projects if I need o. When it comes time to deploy, I commit my changes to both projects, deploy my library code to the App Catalog, and then npm uninstall the library from the consuming project and add a reference as described in the above tutorial. When I deploy projects that use my library, they just work.
I recently developed a library that uses pnpjs, in particular the #pnp/sp library that is used to talk to SharePoint. If you look at the Getting Started guide for that library, they expect you to pass a reference to your Application Customizer or Web Part context during setup, or explicitly set things up using a base URL and so forth - and of course, a library doesn't really have a page context of any sort - the whole point of this code is that it's reusable. So that poses a challenge. My solution was to do the setup in the consuming web part(s) and ensure that they pass a reference to the sp object (which is of type SPRest) to any code or components that exist in my library. My library has peerDependencies on those pnp libraries so that the code isn't duplicated in consuming projects. Sometimes you have to think about what your library needs to include in its bundle and what you expect consuming solutions to already have, and maybe find ways to ensure things aren't included that aren't needed.
For example, in the scenario you talk about, you may want to ensure fluentui or office-ui-fabric-react are only devDependencies or peerDependencies for your library. As long as your library and the project(s) consuming your library both use the right version(s) you shouldn't have any trouble, and you can document any pre-requisites with your library documentation. You can check which versions of these libraries are installed per the SPFX version you are currently using ie. SPFX v1.11 or v1.12 etc. Just run npm ls <packagename> to get a breakdown, or check your package.json file.

Meteor integrating bought theme/js freezes meteor server

I have a bought One ui theme that I'm trying to integrate into Meteor.
I have browsed stack overflow for the solution for hours and I'm stuck.
I have copied the complete assets folder into a newly made imports directory on the client side and tried to use import on the client main.js to import the modules I need. The problem with this is that when I run the server with meteor --port xxxx it hangs up on building web application and just freezes.
I have also tried putting it in a client/compatibility folder for the javascript and it doesn't seem to work.
Does anyone have any insight into this?
For the static html I just created a new template with the html and that worked.

Client/lib is where you put your JS libraries.
rootproject/public is where you put your static assets(images/fonts).
Look for packages on atmosphere.js and check if they are compatible with what you're trying to do. This is the most confusing step because the package names will not exactly be the same as the third party js libs. Trial and error.
Any third party js files you can't find on atmosphere.js you dump the js files in client/lib.

Can't generate webpack-assets.json with webpack-isomorphic-tools

I'm trying to learn React and the whole environment built around it. I do that by trying to construct my own dev-stack.
The problem I can't get across for a very long time is how to serve CSS/Images while not loosing a power of server rendering.
I've read a couple of tutorials and discovered webpack-isomorphic-tools
I've configured them and managed to get an images supported, sass (transformed to css) as well.
However, I came across an issue that my webpack-assets.json file is not generated, instead I see this output. ( I managed to get it generated on a 2nd run of npm start before this commit, but that was definitely not a way to go , but it showed that the plugin works when a file is present.)
$ npm start
> redux-universal-example#0.0.0 start /Users/janvorcak/learning2016
> node src/server/index.js
[webpack-isomorphic-tools] (waiting for the first Webpack build to finish)
[webpack-isomorphic-tools] (waiting for the first Webpack build to finish)
[webpack-isomorphic-tools] (waiting for the first Webpack build to finish)
[webpack-isomorphic-tools] (waiting for the first Webpack build to finish)
I understand the purpose of this file, but I can't really figure out why it's not generated at all.
Is there anything that I'm missing?
Here are the relevant files and a repository
https://github.com/jvorcak/universal-react-kit/tree/sass-loader
(sass-loader branch on my universal-react-kit repository)
configuration -
https://github.com/jvorcak/universal-react-kit/blob/sass-loader/webpack-isomorphic-tools-configuration.js
webpack.config.js -
https://github.com/jvorcak/universal-react-kit/blob/sass-loader/webpack.config.js
entry file when running a server https://github.com/jvorcak/universal-react-kit/blob/sass-loader/src/server/index.js
Could somebody please explain what is going on, I've read documentation, blogs, but I'm missing something here. Thank you.

The reason the assets file is not generated is because you have integrated webpack-dev-server into your server.js.
https://github.com/jvorcak/universal-react-kit/blob/master/src/server/server.js#L81
That's a wrong way to do it because in production you won't need webpack-dev-server and therefore its place is somewhere else.
In your case webpack-dev-server is meant to generate webpack-assets.json and this webpack-dev-server is being run after webpack-isomorphic-tools .server() method calls its callback, but it won't call its callback until it finds webpack-assets.json.
The answer is to run your webpack-dev-server in a separate process (you may want to refer to github.com/erikras/react-redux-universal-hot-example for an example of how to achieve that).
https://github.com/halt-hammerzeit/webpack-isomorphic-tools/issues/47
You may also like my very own boilerplate which can do all the fancy things
https://github.com/halt-hammerzeit/webapp

Bundler for javascript, or how to source control external javascript files

I am in the process of converting an existing Rails 3.1 app I made for a client into a Backbone.js app with the Rails app only as a backend server extension. This is only a personal project of mine, to learn more about Backbone.js.
While setting up Backbone.js (using Backbone-on-Rails), I noticed I have some dependencies (like backbone-forms) that come from external sources and are frequently updated.
I've grown accustomed to using Bundler to manage my Ruby gems, but I haven't found anything similar for JavaScript files. I'm wondering if there is any way to do the same for Javascript (and possibly css) files.
Basically I can see three possibilities to solve this issue:
Simply write down all the sources for each JS file and check these sources from time to time to see what has changed.
Use some kind of existing "Bundler for Javascript" type of tool, I've been looking for something like this but have yet to find anything (good).
Since most of these JS files will be coming from Git anyway, use Git to get the files directly and use checkout to get the latest version from time to time.
I prefer the last option, but was hoping on some more input from other people who have gone this route or preferred some other way to tackle this issue (or is this even an issue?).
I figure the Git way seems easy, but I am not quite sure yet how I could make this work nicely with Rails 3.1 and Sprockets. I guess I'd try to checkout a single file using Git and have it be cloned in a directory that is accessible to Sprockets, but I haven't tried this yet.
Any thoughts?

You don't mention it in your alternatives, but ideally you should use something like Maven to manage your dependencies. Unfortunately, there are no public repositories for javascript files. This discussion lists some other options which might be of help to you: JQuery Availability on Maven Repositories

For now I've settled on using the Git solution combined with some guard-shell magic.
The steps I follow:
Create a dependencies directory somewhere on your local drive
Clone the repositories with javascript (or css) files you want to use in the app
Set up a custom guard-shell command to do the following:
group 'dependencies' do
guard 'shell' do
dependencies = '~/path/to/dependencies/'
watch(%r{backbone-forms/src/(backbone\-forms\.js)}) {|m| `cp #{dependencies + m[0]} vendor/assets/javascripts/#{m[1]}` }
end
end
Place the Guardfile at the root of the app directory
It takes some time to set things up, but after that, when you have the Guard running, and you pull changes into your dependencies, the required files are automatically copied to your application directory, which are then part of your repository.
It seems to work great, you need to do some work for each new file you want to include in the asset pipeline, but all that is required is cloning the repository in your dependencies directory and adding a single line to your Guardfile, for example for the backbone-form css:
watch(%r{backbone-forms/src/(backbone\-forms\.css)}) {|m| `cp #{dependencies + m[0]} vendor/assets/stylesheets/#{m[1]}` }
Also, the reason I added this Guard to a group is because I keep my dependencies outside the main application directory, which means guard normally doesn't check my dependencies directory. To make this work, I start up my main Guard processes using bundle exec guard -g main and use bundle exec guard -w ~/path/to/dependencies -g dependencies in a new terminal window/tab to specify the -w(atchdir).