Optimize Plugin for Webpack

Optimize your code for modern browsers while still supporting the other 10%, increasing your build performance, reducing bundle size and improving output quality.

Put simply: it compiles code faster, better and smaller.

Features

• Much faster than your current Webpack setup
• Transparently optimizes all of your code
• Automatically optimizes all of your dependencies
• Compiles bundles for modern browsers (90%) and legacy browsers (10%)
• Removes unnecessary polyfills, even when inlined into dependencies
• Builds a highly-optimized automated polyfills bundle

Install

npm install --save-dev optimize-plugin

Usage

First, disable any existing configuration you have to Babel, minification, and module/nomodule.

Then, add OptimizePlugin to your Webpack plugins Array:

plugins: [
  new OptimizePlugin({
    // any options here
  })
]

Options

Option	Type	Description
concurrency	number|false	Maximum number of threads to use. Default: the number of available CPUs. Pass false for single-threaded, sometimes faster for small projects.
sourceMap	boolean|false	Whether or not to produce source maps for the given input.
minify	boolean|false	Minify using Terser, if turned off only comments will be stripped.
downlevel	boolean|true	Produces a bundle for nomodule browsers. (IE11, ...)
modernize	boolean|true	Attempt to upgrade ES5 syntax to equivalent modern syntax.
verbose	boolean|false	Will log performance information and information about polyfills.
polyfillsFilename	string|polyfills.legacy.js	The name for the chunk containing polyfills for the legacy bundle.

How does this work?

Instead of running Babel on each individual source code file in your project, optimize-plugin transforms your entire application's bundled code. This means it can apply optimizations and transformations not only to your source, but to your dependencies - making polyfill extraction and reverse transpilation steps far more effective.

This setup also allows optimize-plugin to achieve better performance. All work is done in a background thread pool, and the same AST is re-used for modern and legacy transformations. Previous solutions for module/nomodule have generally relied running two complete compilation passes, which incurs enormous overhead since the entire graph is built and traversed multiple times. With optimize-plugin, bundling and transpilation are now a separate concerns: Webpack handles graph creation and reduction, then passes its bundles to Babel for transpilation.

License

Apache-2.0