If you want to, with Webpack you can use different pre-processors for your CSS: Sass, Less and PostCSS are the most popular ones. I won’t go into the differences between them but I will say why I chose PostCSS.

I like how extensible is via its plugins, gives me the freedom to pick and choose, and why not extend it myself. The rest is like a canned product, leave it or take it, it works but I find PostCSS extensibility better.

PostCSS

The configuration to use PostCSS is the following:

First install the postcss-loader, we are going to let webpack handle the processing while bundling.

npm install postcss-loader --save-dev

Then add it to your webpack.config.js :

module . exports = { module : { loaders : [ { test : / \. css$/ , loader : " style-loader!css-loader!postcss-loader " } ] }, postcss : function () { return []; } }

This won’t do anything until we use a plugin, the one that gives you the “Sass/Less” most common features is precss.

npm install precss --save-dev

Then we use it:

var precss = require ( ' precss ' ); module . exports = { module : { loaders : [ { test : / \. css$/ , loader : " style-loader!css-loader!postcss-loader " } ] }, postcss : function () { return [ precss ]; } }

And now you can write with the precss syntax in your css!

Stylelint

Besides helping with standarizing quality, I always think that a great way to learn a languague/framework/technology is leaning on tools that “already know” what are the good practices that you need to follow. In case of PostCSS this is Stylelint. It’s a CSS linter that helps you enforce consistent conventions and avoid errors in your stylesheets. It works for the 3 pre-processors we mentioned.

The best option out there integrated with Webpack right now I think is the stylelint-webpack-plugin. You can always use the CLI interface too.

Let’s see how to configure it:

npm install --save stylelint-webpack-plugin

var StyleLintPlugin = require ( ' stylelint-webpack-plugin ' ); module . exports = { // ... plugins : [ new StyleLintPlugin ({ /* Options */ }), ], // ... }

All the options for it can be seen here. This will output all the corresponding warnings/erros and fail if you want it to. Just one note there, the options example says:

context : ' inherits from webpack '

“inherits from webpack” is not a valid value, I’ve seen people defining it like that, but it’s not a valid value (see this issue).

Stylefmt

When using linters you also might need something that helps you fixing the low-hanging fruit problems in your stylesheets. This is key when you are introducing a linter into an existing project. stylefmt aims to help with that.

Right now, with Webpack, you can use the stylefmt-loader. Same as Stylelint, the CLI is also available.

This loader will automatically fix whatever it can in your stylesheets before pre-processing them.

The configuration:

npm install --save stylefmt-loader

" module " : { " loaders " : [ { " test " : / \ . css / , " loader " : " css!postcss!stylefmt " } ] }

Conclusion

With this tools, you have the power to scale your css development in your project, with a set of standards and rules that will be automatically enforced in your dev process, making your application easier to maintain and improving the overall quality of it.

Hope it helps!

Till next time!