Webpack v4 — how to access 'mode' option value

Question

Webpack v4 has introduced two sets of defaults: production and development. My question is: Is there a way to refer to those inside a configuration file? I know I can still pass environment variables as:

--env.NODE_ENV=development

by doing this I have two independent environment variables and this doesn't feel right. Another option would be obviously to refer to a different config file and this doesn't look like an optimal solution for simple configurations as well.

Am I missing something here?

Answer 1

Found a better way in a webpack github issue. Since webpack 2 you can export a function in webpack.config.js, the parsed argv will be passed to that function.

For webpack 4 you can write the config like:

// webpack.config.js
module.exports = (env, argv) => {
    console.log(argv.mode);
    return { /* your config object */ };
};

// $webpack-cli --mode development
// development

---

Original Answer:

You can use some libs like minimist to parse the arguments passed by the cli:

// webpack.config.js
const args = require('minimist')(process.argv.slice(2));
console.log(args.mode);

// $webpack-cli --mode development
// development