[Question] Large client-side bundle filesize when requiring feathers client

[petermikitsh]

Hi Feathers team,

When adding the following lines to my project, my webpack bundle.js file grows from 629 kB to 2.06 MB.

const feathers = require('feathers/client');
const rest = require('feathers-rest/client');
const superagent = require('superagent');
const app = feathers().configure(
  rest(__API__).superagent(superagent)
);

Superagent is ~20kb (upon comparison webpack builds with and without it), so I suspect the majority of the increase is due to feathers and feathers-rest. Is there anyway (1) I can optimize Webpack to reduce my bundle filesize or (2) code changes to feathers to export less stuff?

[daffl]

The Browserified feathers-client is about 17k minified + gzipped.

The issue is probably babel-polyfill not mapped to an empty module (see https://github.com/feathersjs/feathers-client/blob/master/package.json#L48 - we might have to add this in the main feathers module) and then including your own ES6 polyfill (a babel-polyfill browser build or the core-js main distributable).

Another problem might be accidentally including feathers instead of feathers/client somewhere which will try to bundle browser builds for everything that comes with Express.

[petermikitsh]

It appears to be an issue with my configuration. A sandboxed webpack build produces expected results (52.3kb) -- see petermikitsh/feathers-client-filesize.

$ npm run build

> [email protected] build /Users/pmikitsh/git/feathers-client-filesize
> webpack --config ./webpack.js

Hash: 71a7163aa1c3777646da
Version: webpack 1.13.1
Time: 1143ms
        Asset       Size  Chunks             Chunk Names
    bundle.js    53.2 kB       0  [emitted]  main
bundle.js.map  122 bytes       0  [emitted]  main
 bundle.js.gz    14.1 kB          [emitted]  
   [0] multi main 28 bytes {0} [built]
    + 38 hidden modules

I'll report back if I find a solution for my actual project's configuration.

[petermikitsh]

Wrapping my DefinePlugin variable with JSON.stringify(...) in my webpack file fixed the problem.

With React + Redux + Feathers + Lots of other fun things, new webpack build size is 682 kB, and gzipped 160 kB.

🎉