Something I really like from React Native is the global variable __DEV__. Being able to do things only in the development environment is quite handy. This concept is not unique to React Native, but that’s where I was introduced to it.

I’ve found myself in need of a similar strategy while building this static site in Rails. I have some dynamic interactions that I can use to curate content on my own machine, but I don’t want those scripts bloating the static build that is deployed to production.

This can be achived in Rails with webpacker using Webpack’s DefinePlugin!

// config/webpacker/environment.js
const { environment } = require("@rails/webpacker")
const webpack = require("webpack")

environment.plugins.prepend(
  "Define",
  new webpack.DefinePlugin({
    STATIC: process.env.NODE_ENV === "production",
  }),
)

module.exports = environment