Webpacker has served the Rails community for over five years as a bridge to compiled and bundled JavaScript. This bridge is no longer needed for most people in most situations following the release of Rails 7. We now have three great default answers to JavaScript in 2021+, and thus we will no longer be evolving Webpacker in an official Rails capacity.
For applications currently using Webpacker, the first recommendation is to switch to jsbundling-rails with Webpack (or another bundler). You can follow the switching guide, if you choose this option.
Secondly, you may want to try making the jump all the way to import maps. That's the default setup for new Rails 7 applications, but depending on your JavaScript use, it may be a substantial jump.
Finally, you can continue to use Webpacker as-is. We will continue to address security issues on the Ruby side of the gem according to the normal maintenance schedule of Rails. But we will not be updating the gem to include newer versions of the JavaScript libraries. This pertains to the v5 edition of this gem that was included by default with previous versions of Rails.
The development of v6 will not result in an official gem released by the Rails team nor see any future support. But Justin Gordon is continuing that line of development – including a focus on hot-module reloading features etc – under a new gem called Shakapacker that is based on the unreleased v6 work from this repository.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to Webpacker over the last five-plus years!
Please refer to the 5-x-stable branch for 5.x documentation.