📦 Minipack

A simplified example of a modern module bundler written in JavaScript

Introduction

As front-end developers, we spend a lot of time working with tools like Webpack, Browserify, and Parcel.

Understanding how those tools work can help us make better decisions on how we write our code. By understanding how our code turns into a bundle and how that bundle looks like we can also debug it better.

The purpose of this project is to explain how most bundlers work under the hood. It contains a short implementation of a simplified but still reasonably accurate bundler. Along with the code, there are comments explaining what the code is trying to achieve.

Try running the code

Start by installing dependencies:

$ npm install

And then run our script:

$ node src/minipack.js

Cool, where do I start?

Head on to the source code: src/minipack.js.

Additional links

• AST Explorer
• Babel REPL
• Babylon
• Babel Plugin Handbook
• Webpack: dependency managment