Webpack - Critical dependency: the request of a dependency is an expression
12:20 20 Mar 2017

I am getting three warning messages when importing request in a barebone webpack project. A minimal example to reproduce the bug is available on GitHub (run npm install and npm start).

Critical dependency: the request of a dependency is an expression

How can I get rid of this warning?


More information:

Webpack tries to resolve require calls statically to make a minimal bundle. When a library uses variables or expressions in a require call (such as require('' + 'nodent') in these lines of ajv), Webpack cannot resolve them statically and imports the entire package.

My rationale is that this dynamic import is not desirable in production, and code is best kept warning-free. That means I want any solution that resolves the problem. E.g.:

  1. Manually configure webpack to import the required libraries and prevent the warnings from occurring.
  2. Adding a hack.js file to my project that overrides the require calls in some way.
  3. Upgrading my libraries. ajv-5.0.1-beta.3 has a fix that silences the warnings. However, if I want to use it, I have to wait until it is released, and then until har-validator and request release subsequent updates. If there is a way to force har-validator to use the beta version of ajv, that would solve my problem.
  4. Other
webpack request ajv