This is the final chapter of this book for Webpack 5.0. By now, you may feel like an expert, but proof of your mastery comes both from your ability to take ownership of the code itself and to customize the platform, and even to hack into it. A purist might shy away from terms such as hacking in favor of workarounds or patching, but we are essentially talking about the same subject (except explaining to the layperson that you have hacked Webpack during live production would certainly impress the most ardent skeptic of your coding superpowers).

That being said, this chapter is a compilation of the hardest things to do in Webpack and the easiest ways to accomplish them. We will begin with authoring libraries and move on to custom loaders, something discussed in this guide already, particularly with the use of Babel's application programming interface (API). This chapter will, however, discuss a more native approach to customization without the need for an API.

We will, naturally, cover some topics already discussed in some detail in this guide, such as testing and shimming, but this guide will offer a little more salience and relevance to customization.

From there, we will cover some very interesting hacks, specifically when working with live publications in a Hot Module Replacement (HMR)-enabled environment.

Some of the topics covered in this final chapter are as follows: 

• Authoring libraries
• Custom loaders
• Live coding hacks