Building Your Application with Gulp and webpack
Simone Chiaretta · 2018
This chapter covers Gulp and webpack, two of many build automation systems for front-end development. It describes how Visual Studio 2017 integrates with Gulp and build systems. Webpack has a bit steeper learning curve compared to Gulp, so before seeing some examples, the chapter looks at the main concepts: entry, output, loaders, and plugins. It all starts with the entry point of the application, which is where webpack starts to follow the dependencies tree from. Once webpack is run, the style will be bundled together with the JavaScript files and injected into the header section of the HTML file at runtime. The Bundler and Minifier simplifies the process of managing CSS and JavaScript files by providing menu items for creating bundles during development in Visual Studio. Tasks, both from the bundler and minifier and for Gulp, can also be run manually via the Task Runner Explorer.