The UpgradeJS Blog

We, full stack Rails engineers, have come a long way. We started off as full stack engineers with our backend and frontend all in one framework. We had the asset pipeline (with sprockets) to help us maintain this ecosystem. When the time came we introduced webpacker to fill in where sprockets fell short.

In this post we will take a look at how we can take the next step on our journey by migrating from webpacker to esbuild.

With the release of Rails 6, Webpack was introduced as the default JavaScript bundler by using the Webpacker gem. We tend to think about Webpack only as a tool to handle JavaScript files, but it can be used to handle all kinds of asset files. This article shows how to create a Rails app that uses only Webpack to handle all the assets, including images, fonts, styles and videos.