Write to .js instead of .json

[noahgrant]

I love using this plugin to keep my core chunk from changing anytime any of the child chunks change. However, I feel like there's a gap between easy plug-and-play:

1. This plugin writes the filenames/hashes to a json file and tells webpack to look for them in the global manifestVariable variable.
2. Webpack is built and looks for these files/hashes in the global manifestVariable variable.

...but we still have to manually attach the json to the global manifestVariable variable ourselves.

It'd be nice to have an option where instead of printing out the json to a .json file, it prints it out to .js file as:

window.<manifestVariable> = <parsedJSON>;

Then all we would need to do is attach the script tag or inline it. Would that make sense?

[jouni-kantola]

To handle the specific use case you're after I created this https://github.com/jouni-kantola/inline-chunk-manifest-html-webpack-plugin, @noahgrant. It consumes the webpack manifest JSON file when building (note issue: #26).

Now that I'm looking around I noticed there are a couple of PR's for chunk-manifest-webpack-plugin also addressing this: #15 and #18

[noahgrant]

Thanks @jouni-kantola, but what I actually want is the flexibility to write the result to file instead of assuming that I want to inline it. I've forked this repo and made that functionality for myself, but I haven't seen maintainers very responsive here, so I haven't opened a PR yet.

[noahgrant]

Hi! Just following up; any interest here for adding this? I can cut a PR...

[iamdavidjackson]

I would like this too! I've opened a PR here: #37 which makes the emitted file prepend window.manifestVariable to the file so you can drop it into any page.