我将依赖项与wepback捆绑在一起进行生产

Question

I am using webpack to create my production bundle for running an express application. I thought the webpack externals field would bundle up the dependencies I required to deploy without having to do a yarn install or an npm install.

My server webpack config looks like this:

      const config = merge(common, {
        name: 'server',
        target: 'node',
        externals: readdirSync(path.join(__dirname, '../../node_modules'))
  .filter(x => !/\.bin|react-universal-component|require-universal-module|webpack-flush-chunks/.test(x))
  .reduce((externals, mod) => {
    externals[mod] = `commonjs ${mod}`;
    return externals;
  }, {});

I can see the following entry for express in the list of externals:

express: 'commonjs express',

But when I try and execute the file with the script that requires the express dependency I get:

Cannot find module 'express'

I thought the whole point of externals was to specify what should be bundled.

Answer 1

I thought the whole point of externals was to specify what should be bundled.

Is the opposite, from the webpack documentation :

The externals configuration option provides a way of excluding dependencies from the output bundles. Instead, the created bundle relies on that dependency to be present in the consumer's environment.

So you don't want express in your externals, because it will actually be excluded from the bundle.