Benefit of this plugin vs rimraf

[johnagan]

Benefit of this plugin vs rimraf

[garygreen]

@chrisblossom well that's more like it! Nice easy to understand code that does something useful with the webpack build chain.

That's really why I'm just struggling to understand why this plugin has become popular - not to stamp on the hard work done on it, but if you take a look at the code it's really not doing anything special.

What's spurred me on to take a deep looker at plugins is because I've been moving from Gulp to Webpack (I'm a total noob at the moment) and it's pretty common to have this kind of thing to determine what to run in dev/production:

production ? <run this task | plugin> : noop

So I was wondering if there was a NoopPlugin for webpack of some kind - and woah, there is! https://github.com/QingWei-Li/noop-webpack-plugin

Intrigued, I took a look at the code:

module.exports = function () {
  return {
    apply: function () {}
  }
}

That's it. Literally does nothing and someone has created a plugin for it! So I just copied and pasted it at the top of my config and renamed it noop. Interesting enough it's got two versions, I assume the first version was doing too much? 🤣

I get similar kind of vibes from this plugin, at the meat of it it's just doing rimraf - presumably over a dist directory. The only other stuff it's doing is options for including/excluding certain directories - but my thoughts on that is the dist directory or whatever folder your adding really should be totally destructible, you shouldn't be storing any files or stuff in dist that should be ignored to begin with.

I dunno. I probably just have a limited understanding of it's greater usage. 🐧

[chrisblossom]

I came to the exact same conclusion. See discussion #60.

I created a plugin that keeps track of, and only removes unused webpack assets (no exclude required): chrisblossom/clean-self-webpack-plugin. I suggested merging it with this plugin, which I am still open to/think the community would benefit from.

[johnagan]

This seems resolved. thanks