Adding Webpack with Hot Module Replacement to speed up Redux/React/Sass development within a Rails 5 app

Piggy-backing on my previous post, Rails5, ActionCable, Redux, and React: Walking through an example chat application, I was curious how difficult it would be to spin up a webpack server with hot module replacement (HMR) alongside Rails (i.e. firing it up on another port) to speed up development of the Redux/React/Sass parts of the app.

The advantage of HMR vs. live-reload (or a manual refresh) is that by auto-updating the page after saving a file it will be smart about maintaining the state of the application (i.e. a hard reload would also refresh the Redux store).

Continue reading »

Note: given that LinkedIn doesn't allow Github gist embeds and this post has a fair amount of code snippets in it, the content will be much easier to read over on Medium (hence the link).