ArangoDB v3.10 reached End of Life (EOL) and is no longer supported.

This documentation is outdated. Please see the most recent stable version.

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.