Progressive Web Apps with React

Our Dev server

If we want to update our code (say, to change our h1 to h2), we’ll have to make the change, rerun yarn build, and then reload the page for every single change we want to see. That’ll slow us down a lot in our development process.

Ideally, every time we change our JavaScript, the Webpack command will automatically rerun, and will reload the page. What a world of luxury that would be!

Fortunately, there’s a package called webpack-dev-server for exactly this purpose. To install it, just run yarn add webpack-dev-server.

Before we jump in, let’s briefly cover how the Dev Server works. It runs a small Node application in the background of our machine, serving up the files in our public folder so that we can see them by visiting ...