Bootstrap and Webpack · Bootstrap v6.0

The official guide for how to include and bundle Bootstrap’s CSS and JavaScript in your project using Webpack.
Want to skip to the end? Download the source code and working demo for this guide from the twbs/examples repository. You can also open the example in StackBlitz for live editing.
Using an AI coding agent? Point it at our bootstrap-webpack skill to automate this setup. See AI for all available skills.
Webpack is a JavaScript module bundler that processes modules and their dependencies to generate static assets. It simplifies managing complex web applications with multiple files and dependencies.
We’re building a Webpack project with Bootstrap from scratch, so there are some prerequisites and upfront steps before we can really get started. This guide requires you to have Node.js installed and some familiarity with the terminal.
Create a project folder and set up npm. We’ll create the my-project folder and initialize npm with the -y argument to avoid it asking us all the interactive questions.
Install Webpack. Next we need to install our Webpack development dependencies: webpack for the core of Webpack, webpack-cli so we can run Webpack commands from the terminal, and webpack-dev-server so we can run a local development server. Additionally, we’ll install html-webpack-plugin to be able to store our index.html in src directory instead of the default dist one. We use --save-dev to signal that these dependencies are only for development use and not for production.
Install Bootstrap. Now we can install Bootstrap. We’ll also install Floating UI and Vanilla Calendar Pro since some of our components depend on them. If you don’t plan on using menus, popovers, or tooltips, you can omit Floating UI. If you don’t plan on using the datepicker, you can omit Vanilla Calendar Pro.
Install additional dependencies. In addition to Webpack and Bootstrap, we need a few more dependencies to properly import and bundle Bootstrap’s CSS and JS with Webpack. These include Sass, some loaders, and Autoprefixer.
Now that we have all the necessary dependencies installed, we can get to work creating the project files and importing Bootstrap.
We’ve already created the my-project folder and initialized npm. Now we’ll also create our src and dist folders to round out the project structure. Run the following from my-project, or manually create the folder and file structure shown below.
When you’re done, your complete project should look like this:
At this point, everything is in the right place, but Webpack won’t work because we haven’t filled in our webpack.config.js yet.
With dependencies installed and our project folder ready for us to start coding, we can now configure Webpack and run our project locally.
Open webpack.config.js in your editor. Since it’s blank, we’ll need to add some boilerplate config to it so we can start our server. This part of the config tells Webpack where to look for our project’s JavaScript, where to output the compiled code to (dist), and how the development server should behave (pulling from the dist folder with hot reload).
Next we fill in our src/index.html. This is the HTML page Webpack will load in the browser to utilize the bundled CSS and JS we’ll add to it in later steps. Before we can do that, we have to give it something to render and include the output JS from the previous step.
We’re including a little bit of Bootstrap styling here with the div class="container" and <button> so that we see when Bootstrap’s CSS is loaded by Webpack.
Now we need an npm script to run Webpack. Open package.json and add the start script shown below (you should already have the test script). We’ll use this script to start our local Webpack dev server. You can also add a build script shown below to build your project.
And finally, we can start Webpack. From the my-project folder in your terminal, run that newly added npm script:
In the next and final section to this guide, we’ll set up the Webpack loaders and import all of Bootstrap’s CSS and JavaScript.
Importing Bootstrap into Webpack requires the loaders we installed in the first section. We’ve installed them with npm, but now Webpack needs to be configured to use them.
Set up the loaders in webpack.config.js. Your configuration file is now complete and should match the snippet below. The only new part here is the module section.
Here’s a recap of why we need all these loaders. style-loader injects the CSS into a <style> element in the <head> of the HTML page, css-loader helps with using @import and url(), postcss-loader is required for Autoprefixer, and sass-loader allows us to use Sass.
Now, let’s import Bootstrap’s CSS. Add the following to src/scss/styles.scss to import all of Bootstrap’s source Sass.
You can also import our stylesheets individually if you want. Read our Sass import docs for details.
Next we load the CSS and import Bootstrap’s JavaScript. Add the following to src/js/main.js to load the CSS and import all of Bootstrap’s JS. Floating UI and Vanilla Calendar Pro will be imported automatically through Bootstrap.
You can also import JavaScript plugins individually as needed to keep bundle sizes down:
Read our JavaScript docs for more information on how to use Bootstrap’s plugins.
And you’re done! 🎉 With Bootstrap’s source Sass and JS fully loaded, your local development server should now look like this:
Now you can start adding any Bootstrap components you want to use. Be sure to check out the complete Webpack example project for how to include additional custom Sass and optimize your build by importing only the parts of Bootstrap’s CSS and JS that you need.
Depending on your setup, you may want to implement some additional security and speed optimizations useful for running the project in production. Note that these optimizations are not applied on the Webpack example project and are up to you to implement.
The style-loader we configured above conveniently emits CSS into the bundle so that manually loading a CSS file in dist/ind