Benjamin Eberlei: Integrate Symfony and Webpack

In his latest entry Benjamin Eberlei shows how he integrated Symfony and Webpack, a tool that makes it simpler to package up multiple assets (like Javascript or CSS files) and reduce them down to combined files, reducing the overhead on page loads.

Asset Management in Symfony2 is handled with the PHP based library Assetic by default, however I have never really connected to this library and at least for me it usually wastes more time than it saves. [...] While researching about React.JS I came across a tool called Webpack which you could compare to Symfony's Assetic. It is primarily focussing on bundling Javascript modules, but you can also ship CSS assets with it.

He talks about some of the main benefits to using the Webpack tool including a built-in web server to serve up the assets and a "hot reload" plugin that refreshes when assets change. He then gets into a more practical example, showing how the tool works with a typical asset structure in a Symfony application. He shows how it uses the internal server to prevent the need for a complete rebuild each time. He also shows how to install and configure it through Symfony and loading the Javascript file in your Twig template. Finally he shows how to run a build, the resulting output and the integration he mentioned with React.js.

Link: http://www.whitewashing.de/2015/02/26/integrate_symfony_and_webpack.html