bin/webpacker-dev-server not optional

[bbuchalter]

Although there are many references to the webpacker-dev-server being optional, the presence of bin/webpacker-dev-server is enforced by the check_binstubs rake task.

Is there interest in making this guard more intelligent? Just remove it? Or be OK with folks adding dummy binstubs?

[gauravtiwari]

@bbuchalter Are you facing any issues due to it's presence? Please consider removing it manually if not needed - rm -rf bin/webpack-dev-server.

[bbuchalter]

Are you facing any issues due to it's presence?

Well, I removed webpack-dev-server from my stack because of recent changes that many people are complaining about [0] and it just doesn't make sense to leave the file in the repo.

[0]: Just a few issues opened recently on one topic in particular that seems to impact the Rails community in particular:
webpack/webpack-dev-server#1170
webpack/webpack-dev-server#1144
webpack/webpack-dev-server#1143
webpack/webpack-dev-server#1136
webpack/webpack-dev-server#1101
webpack/webpack-dev-server#1104
webpack/webpack-dev-server#1084

[stewart]

Hi there!

For some additional context, we ran into the issues @bbuchalter noted with webpack-dev-server a short while back, and decided to remove it from our project, as we weren't getting significant benefits from it, and downgrading caused further issues.

However, after removing the associated binstub (bin/webpack-dev-server), we found we were no longer able to deploy our application, as webpacker's extension of the assets:precompile Rake task adds the webpacker:check_webpack_binstubs task as a dependency. This blows up, as we removed the dev server binstub.

Our (hopefully temporary) solution to this problem is an empty binstub that exists only to satisfy this one Rake task.

I believe that this check is overly aggressive, as webpack-dev-server is an optional component of a Webpack environment, and is certainly not needed to precompile assets. If a PR to modify the check_webpack_binstubs Rake task to remove this assertion is welcome, please let me know.

[gauravtiwari]

@stewart Yeah, makes sense. Lets make webpack-dev-server binstub optional in rake check task.

[ketan]

Is someone working on this PR, if not I think I can whip one up. It's affecting me as well.

[ketan]

Oh well, #1012, seemed straight forward :)

[bbuchalter]

Thanks for helping move this forward! ❤️