Webpack.config how to just copy the index.html to the dist folder

You could use the CopyWebpackPlugin. It's working just like this:

module.exports = {
  plugins: [
    new CopyWebpackPlugin([{
      from: './*.html'
    }])
  ]
}

Option 1

In your index.js file (i.e. webpack entry) add a require to your index.html via file-loader plugin, e.g.:

require('file-loader?name=[name].[ext]!../index.html');

Once you build your project with webpack, index.html will be in the output folder.

Option 2

Use html-webpack-plugin to avoid having an index.html at all. Simply have webpack generate the file for you.

In this case if you want to keep your own index.html file as template, you may use this configuration:

{
  plugins: [
    new HtmlWebpackPlugin({
      template: 'src/index.html'
    })
  ]
}

See the docs for more information.

I would say the answer is: you can't. (or at least: you shouldn't). This is not what Webpack is supposed to do. Webpack is a bundler, and it should not be used for other tasks (in this case: copying static files is another task). You should use a tool like Grunt or Gulp to do such tasks. It is very common to integrate Webpack as a Grunt task or as a Gulp task. They both have other tasks useful for copying files like you described, for example, grunt-contrib-copy or gulp-copy.

For other assets (not the index.html), you can just bundle them in with Webpack (that is exactly what Webpack is for). For example, var image = require('assets/my_image.png');. But I assume your index.html needs to not be a part of the bundle, and therefore it is not a job for the bundler.

I will add an option to VitalyB's answer:

Option 3

Via npm. If you run your commands via npm, then you could add this setup to your package.json (check out also the webpack.config.js there too). For developing run npm start, no need to copy index.html in this case because the web server will be run from the source files directory, and the bundle.js will be available from the same place (the bundle.js will live in memory only but will available as if it was located together with index.html). For production run npm run build and a dist folder will contain your bundle.js and index.html gets copied with good old cp-command, as you can see below:

"scripts": {
    "test": "NODE_ENV=test karma start",
    "start": "node node_modules/.bin/webpack-dev-server --content-base app",
    "build": "NODE_ENV=production node node_modules/.bin/webpack && cp app/index.html dist/index.html"
  }

Update: Option 4

There is a copy-webpack-plugin, as described in this Stackoverflow answer

But generally, except for the very "first" file (like index.html) and larger assets (like large images or video), include the css, html, images and so on directly in your app via require and webpack will include it for you (well, after you set it up correctly with loaders and possibly plugins).