  We study exclusive charmonium and bottomonium production in ultra-peripheral
heavy-ion collisions and electron-ion collisions within the dipole picture. We
employ heavy quarkonium light-front wavefunctions obtained within the basis
light-front quantization framework, which has some features of the light-front
holographic QCD. We focus on comparison with measurements of exclusive
charmonium and bottomonium production in ultraperipheral $pp$, $p$Pb and PbPb
collisions at LHC and find reasonable agreement with the cross sections. We
also discuss the coherent production cross-section ratios of excited states to
the ground state for charmonium and bottomonium, which exhibit insensitivity to
the dipole model parameters. We show that electron-ion collisions provide an
opportunity for a quantitative study of heavy quarkonium structure.
