jQuery UI built with webpack demo

This repository provides a sample setup to use jQuery UI widgets, built with webpack.

To try this locally, clone this repo, then run:

npm install

Running dev server

The setup includes webpack-dev-server, which builds file as they change and runs a server that auto reloads those changed files. To run:

npm start

Building for production

To build static files that can be uploaded on GitHub pages or any other static file hosting, run:

npm run build

This writes resources into the dist/ folder. They are not minified to make it easy to inspect the result.

Scope of this demo

This demo is mostly useful to show how to use webpack to bundle a single page application that uses jQuery UI. The generated html page has no content on its own, which is a bad approach when you're building public facing websites. For those you'd start with a proper HTML page, but you could still use webpack to bundle the static resources (JS, CSS, images).

Using resolve.alias to simplify imports

The demo is currently using these paths to require the autocomplete widget and its required CSS:

require('jquery-ui/themes/base/core.css');
require('jquery-ui/themes/base/menu.css');
require('jquery-ui/themes/base/autocomplete.css');
require('jquery-ui/themes/base/theme.css');
var autocomplete = require('jquery-ui/ui/widgets/autocomplete');

If you don't want to specify the themes/base and ui/widgets paths for every import, you can use webpack's resolve.alias configuration:

resolve: {
	alias: {
		'jquery-ui': 'jquery-ui/ui/widgets',
		'jquery-ui-css': 'jquery-ui/../../themes/base'
	}
}

This specifies two aliases, one for widgets, one for CSS. With that in place, the code then looks like this:

require('jquery-ui-css/core.css');
require('jquery-ui-css/menu.css');
require('jquery-ui-css/autocomplete.css');
require('jquery-ui-css/theme.css');
var autocomplete = require('jquery-ui/autocomplete');