Using Webpack with Foxx

You can use Webpack  to compile your Foxx services the same way you would compile any other JavaScript code. However there are a few things you will need to keep in mind.

Basic configuration

Because the ArangoDB JavaScript environment is largely compatible with Node.js, the starting point looks fairly similar:

"use strict";
module.exports = {
  mode: "production",
  target: "node",
  output: {
    libraryTarget: "commonjs2"
  },
  externals: [/^@arangodb(\/|$)/]
};

The service context

Foxx extends the module object with a special context property that reflects the current service context. As Webpack compiles multiple modules into a single file your code will not be able to access the real module object provided by ArangoDB.

To work around this limitation you can use the context provided by the @arangodb/locals module:

const { context } = require("@arangodb/locals");

This object is identical to module.context and can be used as a drop-in replacement:

const { context } = require("@arangodb/locals");
const createRouter = require("@arangodb/foxx/router");

const router = createRouter();
context.use(router);

Externals

By default Webpack will attempt to include any dependency your code imports. This makes it easy to use third-party modules without worrying about filtering devDependencies but causes problems when importing modules provided by ArangoDB.

Most modules that are specific to ArangoDB or Foxx reside in the @arangodb namespace. This makes it fairly straightforward to tell Webpack to ignore them using the externals option:

module.exports = {
  // ...
  externals: [/^@arangodb(\/|$)/]
};

You can also use this to exclude other modules provided by ArangoDB, like the joi validation library:

module.exports = {
  // ...
  externals: [/^@arangodb(\/|$)/, "joi"]
};

Compiling scripts

As far as Webpack is concerned, scripts are additional entry points:

const path = require("path");
module.exports = {
  // ...
  context: path.resolve(__dirname, "src"),
  entry: {
    main: "./index.js",
    setup: "./scripts/setup.js"
  }
};

Note: If your scripts are sharing a lot of code with each other or the rest of the service this can result in some overhead as the shared code will be included in each output file. A possible solution would be to extract the shared code into a separate bundle.

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