express-dev

Express-Dev

An express wrapper which takes in a webpack config and returns you an express app with webpack dev middleware and webpack hot middleware in the stack.

expressDev = require 'express-dev'
config = require './config/webpack.dev.config'
app = expressDev(config)

You can add your own middlewares to this app instance just as you would with a standard express instance.

An example of it in usage within an app would look like this

JS Example

import path from 'path';
import { Router } from 'express';
import expressDev from 'express-dev';
import config from './config/webpack.dev.config';
 
const app = expressDev(config);
app.set('views', path.join(process.cwd(), 'src', 'views'));
app.set('view engine', 'jade');
 
const router = new Router();
router.get('/', (req, res, next) => res.render('index'));
 
app.use(router);
app.listen(3000, () => console.log('listening on port 3000'));

Coffeescript example

path = require 'path'
{Router} = require 'express' 
expressDev = require 'express-dev'
config = require './config/webpack.dev.config'
 
app = expressDev(config)
app.set 'views', path.join(process.cwd(), 'src', 'views')
app.set 'view engine', 'jade'
 
router = new Router()
router.get('/', (req, res, next) -> res.render 'index' )
 
app.use(router)
app.listen(3000, -> console.log 'listening on 3000')

Now you can dev your front end code with hot module reloading if it can do it, or live reloading if it cant.