How to determine the installed webpack version

Question

Especially during the transition from webpack v1 to v2, it would be important to programmatically determine what webpack version is installed, but I cannot seem to find the appropriate API.

Answer 1

Version Installed:

Using webpack CLI: (--version, -v Show version number [boolean])

webpack --version

or:

webpack -v

Using npm list command:

npm list webpack

Results in name@version-range:

<projectName>@<projectVersion> /path/to/project
└── webpack@<version-range>

Using yarn list command:

yarn list webpack

---

How to do it programmatically?

Webpack 2 introduced Configuration Types.

Instead of exporting a configuration object, you may return a function which accepts an environment as argument. When running webpack, you may specify build environment keys via --env, such as --env.production or --env.platform=web.

We will use a build environment key called --env.version.

webpack --env.version $(webpack --version)

or:

webpack --env.version $(webpack -v)

For this to work we will need to do two things:

Change our webpack.config.js file and use DefinePlugin.

The DefinePlugin allows you to create global constants which can be configured at compile time.

-module.exports = {
+module.exports = function(env) {
+  return {
    plugins: [
      new webpack.DefinePlugin({
+        WEBPACK_VERSION: JSON.stringify(env.version) //<version-range>
      })
    ]
+  };
};

Now we can access the global constant like so:

console.log(WEBPACK_VERSION);

---

Latest version available:

Using npm view command will return the latest version available on the registry:

npm view [<@scope>/]<name>[@<version>] [<field>[.<subfield>]...]

---

For webpack use:

npm view webpack version