The JavaScript ecosystem has been rapidly evolving over the past several years, resulting in new frameworks and libraries popping up constantly. Bundlers came about as a way to enable developers to split a JavaScript application into several files without having to worry about managing global namespaces, script loading order, or an incredibly long list of <script> tags in the HTML file. A bundler combines all of the files into one and resolves any naming collisions.

Webpack is, at the time of writing, one of the most popular bundlers for frontend development. It does much more than combine JavaScript files, however. It also performs complex tasks such as code-splitting and tree shaking (dead-code elimination). Webpack was designed with a plugin architecture, which resulted in a massive amount of community-developed plugins. A search for Webpack on npm currently returns over 12,000 packages! This exhaustive list of plugins, along with its powerful built-in feature set, makes Webpack a full-fledged build tool.