reactjs/react-rails

Update docs regarding HMR support

Judahmeek opened this issue · 3 comments

Discussed in #1234

Originally posted by sanex3339 December 11, 2022
Hi. I'm not sure, maybe the README is outdated, but it says that this gem does not support HMR when SSR is enabled.
I was able to make it work both for server and client bundles.

What i did:

  • added process.env.WEBPACK_SERVE && 'react-refresh/babel' plugin to the babel.config.js file
  • used bin/webpack-dev-server file to build bundles + run dev server
  • in the webpack config we have the following option for the dev server:
devServer: {
      devMiddleware: {
        publicPath: '/some_project/assets',
        writeToDisk: filename => filename.includes('server_rendering.js')
      },
      host: 'localhost',
      port: appConfig.port,
      https: false,
      hot: true,
      liveReload: false,
      client: { overlay: false },
      allowedHosts: ['localhost'],
      headers: { 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*' }
    }

The important thing is to use writeToDisk and in my case i only save server_rendering.js file to the disk, so the server is able to always read the updated file.

  • added the ReactRefreshWebpackPlugin to the webpack config as well
if (Env.isDevelopment) {
  config.plugins.push(
    new ReactRefreshWebpackPlugin({
      overlay: {
        sockPort: DEV_SERVER_PORT
      }
    })
  )
}
  • as output.publicPath value for dev environment we use http://localhost:${DEV_SERVER_PORT}/some_project/assets, so all client assets are served by the dev server as well
  • we don't use shakepaker config in the babel or webpack configs at all
  • in webpacker.yml for dev environment we have:
  # we don't use shakapacker to control webpack-dev-server
  # but react-rails needs this to find server_rendering.js for dev-server build
  dev_server:
    https: false
    host: localhost
    port: SET YOUR DEV SERVER PORT HERE
    hmr: true,
    allowed_hosts: [ 'localhost' ]
    headers:
      'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*'
    static:
      watch:
        ignored: '**/node_modules/**'

And this is all, the HMR works, the server renders updated HTML every time when react code is changed.

@Judahmeek
I think we should wait for #1252 to get finalized before applying these changes. Right?

@ahangarha now that #1274 (which superseded #1252) has been merged, we should confirm that HMR works correctly.

I just tested HMR on a typical installation of React-Rails 3.1.1 + Shakapacker 7.0.3.

HMR works perfectly as expected. No further modification is required.