Consolidate the optimization.runtimeChunk true and 'single' options

[edmorley]

Do you want to request a feature or report a bug?
Feature

What is the current behavior?
If optimization.runtimeChunk is set to true, multiple runtime chunks are created if there is more than one entrypoint. To avoid this, optimization.runtimeChunk has to be set to 'single' instead.

What is the expected behavior?
That optimization.runtimeChunk: true does the right thing even when there are multiple entrypoints, and the 'single' option be deprecated then eventually removed.

If this is a feature request, what is motivation or use case for changing the behavior?

• as an end-user it's confusing to have two options (true and 'single') to switch on what is mostly the same feature, where one (true) is actually 'broken'/suboptimal for multi-entrypoints. (In the docs and blog posts, people often forget to emphasise the need to use 'single')
• I can't see a disadvantage for using 'single' even when there is only one entry-point - so why not make that be the behaviour for true?

Many thanks :-)

[sokra]

is actually 'broken'/suboptimal for multi-entrypoints

What makes you believe it's broken/suboptimal?

Assuming the runtimeChunk is inlined into the HTML page, non-single runtime chunks are better in my opinion. A single runtime chunk only makes sense for scenarios where multiple entrypoints are included into a single page.

[edmorley]

Oh, mine wasn't being inlined.

Digging in more, html-webpack-plugin doesn't support doing so by default, and instead requires use of either inline-manifest-webpack-plugin or webpack-inline-chunk-plugin.

So I guess this is a documentation issue - since neither of those plugins are listed anywhere on:
https://webpack.js.org/guides/caching/#extracting-boilerplate
https://webpack.js.org/guides/output-management/#the-manifest
https://webpack.js.org/concepts/manifest/
https://webpack.js.org/plugins/html-webpack-plugin/

It might also be worth clarifying the optimization.runtimeChunk entry here to explain that true is recommended when inlining the manifest and 'single' when not inlining:
https://webpack.js.org/plugins/split-chunks-plugin/#optimization-runtimechunk

[edmorley]

Also I'm a bit confused about why the separate runtime chunk even needs to be enabled any more. With webpack 3 and earlier, aiui the runtime/manifest changed when any other chunk changed, so it made sense to split it out. And this tweet seems to suggest the same applies now:
https://twitter.com/wSokra/status/969679223278505985

...however the runtime file generated just now via optimization.runtimeChunk: 'single' was identical to that generated the build before, even though I'd adjusted the imports in one of the chunks.

It would seem webpack 4 moved the manifest part somewhere else, thereby making the runtime chunk consistent?

Once I have some more clarity, I'm happy to open up specific issues against https://github.com/webpack/webpack.js.org (ideally this discussion would be there already, but since we've started here).

[armaanahluwalia]

@edmorley Were you ever able to figure this out? Trying to use optimization.runtimeChunk: 'single' but having trouble understanding where or how the runtime chunk can be included in our html templates ( complicated a bit further since we're using Django but that would be step 2 )

[edmorley]

I've not looked at this since - I was partly hoping someone would comment with an answer to the above :-)

[armaanahluwalia]

@edmorley No problem. I've solved the problem by including in our Django template a version of the runtime written to disk using a combination of html-webpack-plugin , inline-manifest-webpack-plugin and html-webpack-harddisk-plugin :)

Thanks for the response!

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