Webpacker 6: Image Asset Guide

In order to use your images and SVG files with Webpacker 6, you need to put them in the correct place and import them into your context.

Install

We should be good here.

Usage

Add Assets

mkdir -p app/javascript/media/images

Require Context

// app/javascript/packs/application.js
+
+ function importAll(r) {
+  r.keys().forEach(r);
+ }
+ // Add relevant file extensions as needed below.
+ // I'm sure there is a better way :shrug:
+ importAll(require.context('../media/images/', true, /\.(svg|jpg)$/));

Verify

Note: Restart the dev server for good luck!

Add an SVG and PNG into app/javascript/media/images

In one of your views, add two image tags:

<img src="<%= asset_pack_path 'media/images/icon.svg' %>" />
<img src="<%= asset_pack_path 'media/images/surf.jpg' %>" />

Reload your browser and you should see your images.

Note that <%= asset_pack_path 'media/images/icon.svg' %> only returns a string, so if you would rather inline your SVG files you will need to refer to the Webpack Asset Modules documentation and merge your changes into your Webpack context, as explained in these Webpacker docs.

Comments

[Clément Joubert]

Thanks a lot Andrew for this guide !

I've upgraded everything to Webpacker 6 and seen nice speed improvements with Webpack 5.

One thing I did not manage to replicate is globbing for SCSS files.

With Webpacker 5 we used node-sass-glob-importer which integration with Webpacker is fairly well documented.

With Webpacker 6 the code cannot be ported 1:1 so I tried postcss-easy-import (built-in globbing, in theory) and postcss-import-ext-glob (with a special @import-glob directive) but did not manage to have dir/**/*.scss detect and import files.

Have you or anyone else encountered the need for globbing files with Webpacker 6 ?

Thanks :-)