How to customize webpack build script for React App

Question

I am moving a web app to react, therefore and moving from Grunt as a buildtool over to webpack. Right now, the below code is the webpack.config file. This is set up as recommended for developing and then has a build script (npm run and npm build)

However, the build script now only concatenates the components/react js files and puts them at the root of the dist folder. No other files are copied over. I don't understand the point of the build script if that's all it does. But I need to be able to add that in, however, no resource with reacts build scripts shows how you would go about that

const path = require("path");
const HtmlWebpackPlugin = require("html-webpack-plugin");

module.exports = {
  entry: "./app/src/components/app.js",
  output: {
    path: path.join(__dirname, "/dist"),
    filename: "index_bundle.js"
  },
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.js$/,
        exclude: /node_modules/,
        use: {
          loader: "babel-loader"
        }
      },
      {
        test: /\.css$/,
        use: ["style-loader", "css-loader"]
      }
    ]
  },
  plugins: [
    new HtmlWebpackPlugin({
      template: "./app/index.html"
    })
  ]
};

Answer 1

you do not need a '/'

output: {
    path: path.join(__dirname, "dist"),
    filename: "index_bundle.js"
  },