[Question] do I need to add exclude section to loaders with this library?

[andykais]

Hi, I have a broad question about how this library works. If I use webpack-node-externals like so:

const nodeExternals = require('webpack-node-externals')
module.exports {
  ...
  externals: [nodeExternals()]
}

what does it actually do? The webpack documentation states

The externals configuration option provides a way of excluding dependencies from the output bundles

What I want to know, is if this also prevents anything in the node_modules folder from reaching the loaders. A lot of loaders recommend adding an exclude: /node_modules/ section to prevent node_modules from being transpiled (babel-loader, awesome-typescript-loader, istanbul-instrumenter-loader, etc). I want to know if this step is necessary provided we are already using webpack-node-externals.

[liady]

Yes, the loaders configuration is not affected by this plugin. This plugin merely prevents dependencies (i.e node_modules) from being bundled - and it is used mainly when bundling code as a node library.
(since in a node environment you do not need to bundle your dependencies)