Persistent Cache Webpack Plugin

Webpack plugin that persists the compiler cache to the file system

IMPORTANT - this plugin is an experiment and may be withdrawn at any time

Rationale

Thanks to the Webpack compiler cache, incremental compile can be orders of magnitude faster than the initial compilation the precedes it.

This plugin persists the compiler cache to the file system in order to also reduce the initial compile time.

Limitations

This plugin is experimental and you should be aware of the following.

• Implementation is brittle and its effectiveness is not yet clear.
• The plugin may not be able to serialise all of your cache content, it will warn if it cannot.
• The cache may be large, possibly an orders of magnitude larger than your project.
• The file which persists the cache can grow with use and may need periodic deletion.

Usage

The default options will result in silent operation unless the cache cannot be written.

var PersistentCacheWebpackPlugin = require('persistent-cache-webpack-plugin');
{
  plugins : [
    new PersistentCacheWebpackPlugin({
      file   : './webpack.cache.json',
      warn   : true,
      stats  : false,
      persist: true,
      ignore : []
    })
  ]
}

Options

• file is the path to a file which will persist the cache.

• warn enables feedback on cache properties that failed the serialisation process, use warn:'verbose' for extended detail.

• stats enables feedback on the performance of the plugin.

• persist enables serialisation of the cache to disk. Existing cache is utilised either way.

• ignore an Array of RegExp that allows certain warnings to occur without failing serialisation.