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Bootstrap and Webpack

The official guide for how to include and bundle Bootstrap’s CSS and JavaScript in your project using Webpack.

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Want to skip to the end? Download the source code and working demo for this guide from the twbs/examples repository. You can also open the example in StackBlitz for live editing.

What is Webpack?

Webpack is a JavaScript module bundler that processes modules and their dependencies to generate static assets. It simplifies managing complex web applications with multiple files and dependencies.

Setup

We’re building a Webpack project with Bootstrap from scratch, so there are some prerequisites and upfront steps before we can really get started. This guide requires you to have Node.js installed and some familiarity with the terminal.

  1. Create a project folder and set up npm. We'll create the my-project folder and initialize npm with the -y argument to avoid it asking us all the interactive questions.

    mkdir my-project && cd my-project
npm init -y

  2. Install Webpack. Next we need to install our Webpack development dependencies: webpack for the core of Webpack, webpack-cli so we can run Webpack commands from the terminal, and webpack-dev-server so we can run a local development server. Additionally, we'll install html-webpack-plugin to be able to store our index.html in src directory instead of the default dist one. We use --save-dev to signal that these dependencies are only for development use and not for production.

    npm i --save-dev webpack webpack-cli webpack-dev-server html-webpack-plugin

  3. Install Bootstrap. Now we can install Bootstrap. We'll also install Popper since our dropdowns, popovers, and tooltips depend on it for their positioning. If you don’t plan on using those components, you can omit Popper here.

    npm i --save bootstrap @popperjs/core

  4. Install additional dependencies. In addition to Webpack and Bootstrap, we need a few more dependencies to properly import and bundle Bootstrap’s CSS and JS with Webpack. These include Sass, some loaders, and Autoprefixer.

    npm i --save-dev autoprefixer css-loader postcss-loader sass sass-loader style-loader

Now that we have all the necessary dependencies installed, we can get to work creating the project files and importing Bootstrap.

Project structure

We’ve already created the my-project folder and initialized npm. Now we'll also create our src and dist folders to round out the project structure. Run the following from my-project, or manually create the folder and file structure shown below.

mkdir {src,src/js,src/scss}
touch src/index.html src/js/main.js src/scss/styles.scss webpack.config.js

When you’re done, your complete project should look like this:

my-project/
├── src/
│   ├── js/
│   │   └── main.js
│   ├── scss/
│   │   └── styles.scss
│   └── index.html
├── package-lock.json
├── package.json
└── webpack.config.js

At this point, everything is in the right place, but Webpack won’t work because we haven’t filled in our webpack.config.js yet.

Configure Webpack

With dependencies installed and our project folder ready for us to start coding, we can now configure Webpack and run our project locally.

  1. Open webpack.config.js in your editor. Since it’s blank, we'll need to add some boilerplate config to it so we can start our server. This part of the config tells Webpack where to look for our project’s JavaScript, where to output the compiled code to (dist), and how the development server should behave (pulling from the dist folder with hot reload).

    'use strict'

const path = require('path')
const HtmlWebpackPlugin = require('html-webpack-plugin')

module.exports = {
  mode: 'development',
  entry: './src/js/main.js',
  output: {
    filename: 'main.js',
    path: path.resolve(__dirname, 'dist')
  },
  devServer: {
    static: path.resolve(__dirname, 'dist'),
    port: 8080,
    hot: true
  },
  plugins: [
    new HtmlWebpackPlugin({ template: './src/index.html' })
  ]
}

  2. Next we fill in our src/index.html. This is the HTML page Webpack will load in the browser to utilize the bundled CSS and JS we'll add to it in later steps. Before we can do that, we have to give it something to render and include the output JS from the previous step.

    doctype html>
<html lang="en">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
    <title>Bootstrap w/ Webpacktitle>
  head>
  <body>
    <div class="container py-4 px-3 mx-auto">
      <h1>Hello, Bootstrap and Webpack!h1>
      <button class="btn btn-primary">Primary buttonbutton>
    div>
  body>
html>

    We’re including a little bit of Bootstrap styling here with the div class="container" and

  3. Now we need an npm script to run Webpack. Open package.json and add the start script shown below (you should already have the test script). We'll use this script to start our local Webpack dev server. You can also add a build script shown below to build your project.

    {
  // ...
  "scripts": {
    "start": "webpack serve",
    "build": "webpack build --mode=production",
    "test": "echo \"Error: no test specified\" && exit 1"
  },
  // ...
}

  4. And finally, we can start Webpack. From the my-project folder in your terminal, run that newly added npm script:

    npm start
    Webpack dev server running

In the next and final section to this guide, we'll set up the Webpack loaders and import all of Bootstrap’s CSS and JavaScript.

Import Bootstrap

Importing Bootstrap into Webpack requires the loaders we installed in the first section. We’ve installed them with npm, but now Webpack needs to be configured to use them.

  1. Set up the loaders in webpack.config.js. Your configuration file is now complete and should match the snippet below. The only new part here is the module section.

    'use strict'

const path = require('path')
const autoprefixer = require('autoprefixer')
const HtmlWebpackPlugin = require('html-webpack-plugin')

module.exports = {
  mode: 'development',
  entry: './src/js/main.js',
  output: {
    filename: 'main.js',
    path: path.resolve(__dirname, 'dist')
  },
  devServer: {
    static: path.resolve(__dirname, 'dist'),
    port: 8080,
    hot: true
  },
  plugins: [
    new HtmlWebpackPlugin({ template: './src/index.html' })
  ],
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.(scss)$/,
        use: [
          {
            // Adds CSS to the DOM by injecting a `