Alias Loaders in webpack

A loader might not be named conveniently for your project. Maybe the path to it is too long and obscures the actual configuration of the loader, in that case you can create an alias with the resolveLoader.alias webpack configuration.

module.exports = {
  module: {
    rules: [
      {
        test: /\.js$/,
        loader: 'smrt',
      }
    ]
  },
  resolveLoader: {
    alias: {
      'smrt': require.resolve(__dirname, 'really', 'long', 'path', 'smart-loader.js')
    }
  }
}

In addition, you may only want to transform one file. Its possible to do that in a require statement and use the bang character (!) prefix syntax to declare the loader like this.

require 'smrt!dumbfile';

Clearly in this case a long loader name would obscure intent.