Webpack 4 referencing npm vendor scripts - npm

Question

I'm trying to get my head around Webpack 4 for a medium-to-large scale (MVC) website.
For the solution, I want to use the following, base vendor scripts/styles:
jQuery vLatest minified version
Bootstrap, but only the grid, no javascript or anything else
The site consists on several templates different from each other. Some might have an image gallery where I want to use Owl Carousel vLatest and so on, so forth.
As I've understood, the vendor bundle should only contain the scripts/styles that is used across the entire site, so i.e., the Owl Carousel script/styles should not be a part of the vendor scripts since it's only used for one, maybe two specific templates.
I've installed jQuery and Bootstrap via npm so they're in the node_modules folder. Question is: how do I tell Webpack to use the minified version of jQuery in the vendor bundle? And how do I tell it to use only the grid component from Bootstrap? And what about the other third party scripts/styles, should they be included as their own entry?
My webpack.config.js entry file looks like this:
entry: {
'mysite.bundle.css': './scripts/webpack-entries/mysite.styles.js',
'mysite.bundle.js': glob.sync('./scripts/mysite/*.js'),
'vendor.bundle.js': [
'./node_modules/jquery/dist/jquery.min.js'
],
'vendor.bundle.css': [
'./node_modules/bootstrap/scss/bootstrap-grid.scss'
],
}
What feels weird about this is, that I could just aswell reference the jquery.min.js directly on my view and import bootstrap-grid.scss directly in my .scss files. Same could be said with the Owl carousel (and other vendor scripts)
Also, if I just do this: 'vendor.bundle.js': ['jquery'] the entire non-minified jQuery library is loaded rather than the minified version.
How exactly do you work with Webpack and NPM this way? :-)
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You can use { resolve } to configure aliases:
{
resolve: {
alias: {
'jquery': require.resolve('jquery/jquery.min.js')
}
}
}
However, I would caution first to focus on getting a viable build that's suitable for development and then enhance the configuration as needed to optimize for production. For example, during development you want to include all the sources with their entirety with good source maps. When you get to the point of publishing, use something like Environment Variables to introduce a flag that will enforce the necessary configuration.
No, it's not necessary to create entry points for particular vendor sources. This is reminiscent of the past practices. You should create individual entry points to logically split your large codebase into distinct bundles, like: the public web, the administrative application, the customer application, should you have the need to do so.
Also, don't spend too much time creating entrypoints to group vendor sources and such. Write your modules as you would, from the perspective of a developer, require from them what they depend on and then use webpack { optimize.minimizer }, other minification plugins and it's dependency graph heuristics to create necessary chunks using { optimize.splitChunks }.
Short answer is, and this has been true for webpack for a long time: do not change the way you write and organize sources to satisfy webpack. It's polished and sophisticated enough that it will accommodate to your style of authoring.