Split By Name Webpack Plugin

This plugin will split your entry bundle into any number of arbitrarily defined smaller bundles.

Why?

• Browsers will open between 6 and 10 parallel connections to a single host. By splitting up one large file (your main bundle) into a number of smaller ones, you can leverage these connections to download the files faster.
• It's likely that you will have some third party scripts which you change infrequently. By putting these into their own bundle, then if they haven't changed between builds, your users may still be able to use the cached version from before.

How?

Configuration of the plugin is simple. You instantiate the plugin with a single option: buckets which should be an array of objects, each containing the keys name and regex. Any modules which are in your entry chunk which match the bucket's regex (first matching bucket is used), are then moved to a new chunk with the given name.

Creating a 'catch-all' bucket is not necessary: anything which doesn't match one of the defined buckets will be left in the original chunk.

Example

var SplitByNamePlugin = require('split-by-name-webpack-plugin');
module.exports = {
  entry: {
    app: 'app.js'
  },
  output: {
    path: __dirname + '/public',
    filename: "[name]-[chunkhash].js",
    chunkFilename: "[name]-[chunkhash].js"
  },
  plugins: [
    new SplitByNamePlugin({
      buckets: [{
        name: 'vendor',
        regex: /vendor\//
      }, {
        name: 'views',
        regex: /views\//
      }]
    })
  ]
};

An an example structure of modules included in the entry chunk:

/lib
    /views
        /list.js
        /grid.js
    /url.js
/vendor
    /jquery.js
    /backbone.js
/views
    /home.js
    /banner.js
/app.js

The output would be three files:

• app-[hash].js, containing:
  • app.js
  • lib/url.js
• vendor-[hash].js, containing:
  • vendor/jquery.js
  • vendor/backbone.js
• views-[hash].js, containing:
  • lib/views/list.js
  • lib/views/grid.js
  • views/home.js
  • views/banner.js