README

ngInject Loader

Webpack loader to migrate from legacy @ngInject pre-minifier syntax to "ngInject" syntax

Use in conjunction with ng-annotate to annotate your AngularJS code pre-minification.

Rationale

The ng-annotate project is the seminal pre-minifier for AngularJS. Initially it used the @ngInject annotation doctag but has more recently moved to an "ngInject" directive prologue annotation.

The new annotation syntax plays much better with ES6 and is considered best practice going forward.

If you have legacy code you will want to keep operating with the @ngInject syntax and make the change over time.

This loader reliably detects @ngInject annotations following transpilation. It then rewrites to the new "ngInject" annotation and offers a deprecation warning.

Angular best practice

As default this loader will not invoke the deprecate option. You will find that it identifies @ngInject in transpiled code more effectively than ng-annotate alone.

However it is best practice to migrate your code to the "ngInject" directive prologue annotation. As such the deprecate option is strongly encouraged.

But ultimately this seperates best from good. Both are lightyears ahead of creating Arrays of property strings yourself. However you will want to (eventually) make the change as eliminating this loader will improve your compile time.

Usage

Refer to the Webpack documentation on using loaders.

var css = require('!ng-annotate!nginject!./file.js');

Apply via webpack config

It is preferable to adjust your webpack.config so to avoid having to prefix every require() statement:

module.exports = {
  module: {
    loaders: [
      {
        test   : /\.js$/,
        loaders: ['ng-annotate', 'nginject?deprecate' /*...transpiler? */]
      }
    ]
  }
};

Note that the deprecate option as shown is strongly encouraged.

If you are using a transpiler then place it before (to the right of) nginject-loader as shown.

Options

deprecate implies that a warning should be generated whenever the loader needs to operate. Use this to help migration from @ngInject to "ngInject". It is not activiated by default but is strongly encouraged.
sourceMap generate a source-map.
singleQuote controls the character which is used to deliniate the "ngInject" directive.

Version 2.x vs 1.x

The issue #1 prompted a roll change of this loader and version 1 has now been depricated.

Version 1.x the loader was a more complete pre-minification solution, overlapping the functionality of ng-annotate. Following version 2 this loader acts as a pre-processor to ng-annotate for the purpose of migrating annotations. Overall there should be no capability gap as a result of the change.

Please comment on this issue if your use case cannot suffer migration to the "ngInject" directive prologue annotation syntax.

Usage no npm install needed!