Frequently Asked Questions

Does this tool require that I use Laravel?

No. It has awareness of Laravel, but it can be used for any project. Just be sure to explicitly set the path to your project's public or dist directory, like so:

mix.setPublicPath('dist');

This tells Mix the basic directory where all of your assets should be compiled to.

My code isn't being minified.

Minification will only be performed when your NODE_ENV is set to production. By default, this mode is set to development.

npx mix

If you're ready to build for a production environment, add the --production flag, like so:

npx mix --production

I'm using a VM, and webpack isn't picking up my file changes.

If you're running npx mix through a VM, you may find that file changes are not picked up by webpack. If that's the case, consider configuring webpack to poll your filesystem for changes, like so:

npx mix watch --poll

Why is it saying that an image in my CSS file can't be found in node_modules?

Imagine that you have a relative path to an asset that doesn't exist in your resources/sass/app.scss file.

body {
    background: url('../img/example.jpg');
}

When referencing a relative path, always think in terms of the current file. As such, webpack will look one level up for resources/assets/img/example.jpg. If it can't find it, it'll then begin searching for the file location, including within the massive node_modules directory. If it still can't be found, you'll receive the error:

 ERROR  Failed to compile with 1 errors

This dependency was not found in node_modules:

You have two possible solutions:

1. Make sure that resources/assets/img/example.jpg exists.
2. Add the following to your webpack.mix.js file to disable CSS url() processing.

mix.sass('resources/assets/sass/app.scss', 'public/css')
   .options({
        processCssUrls: false
   });

This is particularly useful for legacy projects where your folder structure is already exactly as you desire.

My mix-manifest.json file shouldn't be in the project root.

If you're not using Laravel, your mix-manifest.json file will be dumped into the project root. If you need to change this, call mix.setPublicPath('dist/');, and your manifest file will now correctly be saved to the dist directory.

Can I autoload modules with Mix and webpack?

Yes. Through its ProvidePlugin plugin, webpack allows for this very functionality. A common use-case for this is when we need jQuery to be available to all of your modules. Here's a webpack-specific example of how you might accomplish this.

new webpack.ProvidePlugin({
    $: 'jquery',
    jQuery: 'jquery'
});

// in a module
$('#item'); // <= just works
jQuery('#item'); // <= just works
// $ is automatically set to the exports of module "jquery"

Of course, Mix provides an API on top of webpack to make this sort of autoloading a cinch.

mix.autoload({
    jquery: ['$', 'window.jQuery', 'jQuery'], // more than one
    moment: 'moment' // only one
});

Above, we're effectively saying, "When webpack comes across the $ or window.jQuery or jQuery symbols, replace it with the exported jQuery module."

Why am I seeing a "Vue packages version mismatch" error?

If, upon updating your dependencies, your compile fails with the message:

Module build failed: Error:

Vue packages version mismatch:

* [email protected]
* [email protected]

This means your vue and vue-template-compiler dependencies are out of sync. Per Vue 2's instructions, the version number for both of these dependencies must be identical. Update as needed to fix the problem:

npm update vue

// or

npm install [email protected]

I'm having trouble updating/installing Mix.

Unfortunately, there are countless reasons why your dependencies may not be installing properly. A common root relates to an ancient version of Node (node -v) and npm (npm -v) installed. As a first step, visit http://nodejs.org and update those.

Otherwise, often, it's related to a faulty lock file that needs to be deleted. Give this series of commands a try to install everything from scratch:

rm -rf node_modules
rm package-lock.json yarn.lock
npm cache clear --force
npm install