How to allow for webpack-dev-server to allow entry points from react-router

Question

I\'m creating an app that uses webpack-dev-server in development alongside react-router.

It seems that webpack-dev-server is built around the assumption that you wil

Answer 1

I'd like to add to the answer for the case when you run an isomorphic app (i.e. rendering React component server-side.)

In this case you probably also want to automatically reload the server when you change one of your React components. You do this with the piping package. All you have to do is install it and add require("piping")({hook: true}) somewhere in the beginning of you server.js. That's it. The server will restart after you change any component used by it.

This rises another problem though - if you run webpack server from the same process as your express server (as in the accepted answer above), the webpack server will also restart and will recompile your bundle every time. To avoid this you should run your main server and webpack server in different processes so that piping would restart only your express server and won't touch webpack. You can do this with concurrently package. You can find an example of this in react-isomorphic-starterkit. In the package.json he has:

"scripts": {
    ...
    "watch": "node ./node_modules/concurrently/src/main.js --kill-others 'npm run watch-client' 'npm run start'"
  },

which runs both servers simultaneously but in separate processes.