concat-text-webpack-plugin

concat-text-webpack-plugin

The ConcatTextPlugin extracts and concatenates text files from a specified glob path into a single file. This is not intended to be used to extract frontend asset files, like stylesheets (use the mini-css-extract-plugin for this). Instead, this plugin is helpful when dealing with raw text assets that have been split into multiple files for code modularisation purposes, but need to be consolidated for consumption by e.g. the project's backend system.

Usage

new ConcatTextPlugin({
    files: "res/**/*.properties",
    name: "values.properties",
    outputPath: "cache/",
})

The above configuration will look for .properties files under the res/ folder (relative to the Webpack config file location) and concatenate them into a single file named values.properties under the cache/ directory, which is relative to the Webpack output path.

Options

files (string)

The glob string to get the list of files that should be concatenated.

name (string, default: same as Webpack output.filename)

The name of the output file. If it is not specified, the output.filename and the files glob string file extension will be used as name. If the glob string doesn't have an extension, the name won't have one either:

module.exports = {
    output: {
        path: "dist/",
        filename: "app.js"
    },
    plugins: [
        new ConcatTextPlugin({
            files: "res/**/*",
            outputPath: "static"
        })
    ]
}

The example above will generate a concatenated file dist/static/app (without a file extension) containing everything under res/. The output file won't have a file extension as well if the glob string matches multiple file types:

module.exports = {
    output: {
        path: "dist/",
        filename: "app.js"
    },
    plugins: [
        new ConcatTextPlugin({
            files: "res/**/*.{txt,properties}",
            outputPath: "static"
        })
    ]
}

Some other examples would be *.js?(x) or *.+(md|markdown). Basically, if the file extension is not exact, the output file won't have one.

So, if you want to explicitly set the file extension for the concatenated file while still matching multiple types, the name options needs to be set. However, in case you don't want to set a static file name and instead prefer to just use the output.filename option of your Webpack config, the [name] placeholder can be of help:

module.exports = {
    output: {
        path: "dist/",
        filename: "app.js"
    },
    plugins: [
        new ConcatTextPlugin({
            files: "res/**/*.{md,markdown}",
            outputPath: "docs",
            name: "[name].md"
        })
    ]
}

outputPath (string, default: same as Webpack output.path)

Specify where the concatenated file should be placed, relative to the Webpack output path. You might also set it to an absolute path. Omitting this option will place the concatenated file at your Webpack output path.

module.exports = {
    output: {
        path: "dist/",
        filename: "app.js"
    },
    plugins: [
        new ConcatTextPlugin({
            files: "res/**/*.md",
            name: "docs.md"
        })
    ]
}

The configuration seen above will write a markdown file dist/docs.md containing every markdown file it could find under the res/ directory.

Tests

There are some basic snapshot tests to assert the output of the loader.

npm test

Publishing

To release a new version of this package, make sure to have the latest changes in the master branch, or at the very least, the changes that should be in a release.

1. Run npm run release -- <new-version> in master. This will create a new release commit and git tag, as well as adjust the version in the package.json and package-lock.json.

The underlying script uses npm version to edit the package.json files and to commit/tag the changes for the release with the specified version. Refer to the npm documentation for more details.

1. Push the commit and tag to master
2. Create a new release on the GitHub Releases Page and specify the existing tag

A GitHub Action will now test and publish the new release.

License

MIT