Friendly errors webpack plugin

Friendly errors webpack plugin recognizes certain classes of webpack errors and cleans, aggregates and prioritizes them to provide a better Developer Experience.

Getting started

Installation

npm install @d2js/friendly-errors-webpack-plugin --save-dev

Basic usage

Simply add FriendlyErrorsWebpackPlugin to the plugin section in your Webpack config.

var FriendlyErrorsWebpackPlugin = require("friendly-errors-webpack-plugin");

var webpackConfig = {
  // ...
  plugins: [new FriendlyErrorsWebpackPlugin()],
  // ...
};

Turn off errors

You need to turn off all error logging by setting your webpack config quiet option to true.

app.use(
  require("webpack-dev-middleware")(compiler, {
    // ...
    logLevel: "SILENT",
    // ...
  })
);

If you use the webpack-dev-server, there is a setting in webpack's devServer options:

// webpack config root
{
  // ...
  devServer: {
    // ...
    quiet: true,
    // ...
  },
  // ...
}

If you use webpack-hot-middleware, that is done by setting the log option to false. You can do something sort of like this, depending upon your setup:

app.use(
  require("webpack-hot-middleware")(compiler, {
    log: false,
  })
);

Options

You can pass options to the plugin:

new FriendlyErrorsPlugin({
  compilationSuccessInfo: {
    messages: ['You application is running here http://localhost:3000'],
    notes: ['Some additional notes to be displayed upon successful compilation']
  },
  onErrors: function (severity, errors) {
    // You can listen to errors transformed and prioritized by the plugin
    // severity can be 'error' or 'warn'
  },
  // should the console be cleared between each compilation?
  // default is true
  clearConsole: true,

  // INFO:    all logs
  // WARNING: warnings and errors
  // ERROR:   only errors
  // SILENT:  no log
  logLevel: true,

  // base: default
  // consola: consola adapter
  // can also be npm package name or reporter object
  reporter: 'consola'

  // add formatters and transformers (see below)
  additionalFormatters: [],
  additionalTransformers: []
})

Adding desktop notifications

The plugin has no native support for desktop notifications but it is easy to add them thanks to node-notifier for instance.

var NotifierPlugin = require('friendly-errors-webpack-plugin');
var notifier = require('node-notifier');
var ICON = path.join(__dirname, 'icon.png');

new NotifierPlugin({
    onErrors: (severity, errors) => {
      if (severity !== 'error') {
        return;
      }
      const error = errors[0];
      notifier.notify({
        title: "Webpack error",
        message: severity + ': ' + error.name,
        subtitle: error.file || '',
        icon: ICON
      });
    }
  })
]

API

Transformers and formatters

Webpack's errors processing, is done in four phases:

1. Extract relevant info from webpack errors.
2. Apply transformers to all errors to identify and annotate well know errors and give them a priority
3. Get only top priority error or top priority warnings if no errors are thrown
4. Apply formatters to all annotated errors

You can add transformers and formatters.

Customize Reporters

Reporter is a class for generating output of errors messages, structure is:

1. Include following levels log methods: success, info, note, warn, error.
2. Include method clearConsole for clearing the terminal console.