๐ŸŽ‰ webpack 2.2: The Final Release ๐ŸŽ‰

webpack 2, official apparel, and so much more!

Sean T. Larkin
webpack
4 min readJan 17, 2017

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Last month we shipped our first Release Candidate for webpack 2.2. Since then, weโ€™ve been hard at work fixing any bugs that you reported. Not only that, but weโ€™ve merged over 220 pull requests from the community in helping us refactor our core library to ES2015 (yes, this means our minimum supported NodeJS version is now 4.3).

On behalf of the entire webpack team, Iโ€™m proud to announce that webpack 2.2.0 is officially in final release!! ๐ŸŽ‰ (And final doesnโ€™t mean that we stop working on it.)

๐Ÿ’ป How to download? ๐Ÿ–ฅ

We will leave the final release on npm published under the beta tag for the first week. This means you can run the following to download webpack 2: (or first-time users can checkout our โ€œGetting Startedโ€ guide)

After that first-week grace period is over, we will move it to the latest tag. This means you will be able to run npm install webpack to install final into your project.

If you are migrating from webpack 1, please see our step-by-step migration guide to walk you through the upgrade process.

For information on specific changes between webpack 2.2.0-RC and 2.2.0, check out our releases page.

๐Ÿ‘• The official webpack store ๐Ÿ‘•

We have partnered with Open Collective and Threadless to create our first official webpack store!

Today we have also published 2 of the most popular tee-shirt designs. They come in a variety of colors and and styles that you can order RIGHT NOW!!

Just a handful of items from our new webpack store. Visit https://webpack.threadless.com/ to see the full variety.

โœˆ๏ธ VIP office hours and on-site training available โœˆ๏ธ

Looking to have additional support with a member of the webpack core team? Interested in having a webpack maintainer come on-site to hold a workshop, presentation, or discussion? We have a few great offerings through our open collective:

  • VIP office hours: We are starting office hours and sponsors with a subscription of at least $500 per month will have access to sign up for them. We can help troubleshoot, teach, or answer whatever webpack or open source related questions you have.
  • On-site visit: On top of VIP hours, for sponsors of $2000/month and up, we will have a webpack maintainer fly to your office and spend the day, training, teaching, advising, and getting to know your team.

We are still working the details out for these offerings. Note that there are only limited amounts available. For questions or information, please email us at webpack@opencollective.com.

๐Ÿ“ Whatโ€™s next? ๐Ÿ“

As no release is perfect, weโ€™ll focus on resolving the most immediate issues that arise. In addition, weโ€™ll also continue to improve our new documentation site.

After that, there are so many things we could do, so we donโ€™t want to decide this alone. Therefore, we set up a voting tool where everyone, especially backers, can decide on the next thing we will tackle. Choose wisely, with great power comes great responsibility.

To vote, you need to login with your GitHub account. Donations for Open Collective are regularly synced. Your Open Collective email address needs to be added to your GitHub account and you need to re-login after that. It can take a few days until your donation is available.

Even as we speak, there is a battle between Typescript Tree Shaking and Scope Hoisting. Both are size/performance optimizations. Vote!

๐Ÿ”ฅ The battle of the optimizations! ๐Ÿ”ฅ

๐Ÿ™‡ Thank you. Again. ๐Ÿ™‡

To all of those involved on our contributor team, the core team, loader and plugin authors, those who submitted their first time commits, or assisted with troubleshooting: we cannot thank you enough. This product is for you and helped shaped by you.

What a time to be alive.

We have said this many times in the past, but the community is what makes webpack strong, sustainable, and vibrant in this JavaScript Renaissance we live in today. Without you all, webpack would still be Yet Another Build Tool (YABT).

No time to help contribute? Want to give back in other ways? Become a Backer or Sponsor to webpack by donating to our open collective. Open Collective not only helps support the Core Team, but also supports contributors who have spent significant time improving our organization on their free time! โค

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Sean T. Larkin
webpack

@Webpack Core team & AngularCLI team. Program Manager @Microsoft @EdgeDevTools. Web Performance, JavaScripter, Woodworker, ๐Ÿ“ Farmer, and Gardener!