No way to force webpack-dev-server client to use window.location

• Operating System: macOS 10.15.3
• Node Version: v12.16.0
• NPM Version: 6.13.4
• webpack Version: 4.41.6
• webpack-dev-server Version: 3.11.0
• Browser: Chrome 81

• This is a bug
• This is a modification request

Expected Behavior

There would be some configuration that would let me force webpack-dev-server’s hot client to use window.location.

Actual Behavior

No configuration will cause webpack-dev-server’s hot client to not use __resourceQuery, which in my case is always "?http://localhost:8080". As far as I can tell, I can’t get this behavior with the current configuration options.

For Features; What is the motivation and/or use-case for the feature?

I’m working on a cloud platform that provides dev environments, and it let’s you proxy requests to localhost via a domain. Out of the box, webpack-dev-server doesn’t work since it tries to hit localhost:8080/sockjs-node. We’ve been working around this by setting public to an environment variable, but the annoying thing is that everyone gets a different domain. It’d be ideal if we could just set a flag on the devServer config that told it to always use window.location so each user wouldn’t have to configure an environment variable.

It’s worth noting that create-react-app doesn’t encounter this because of their custom hot client, which has much simpler logic: https://github.com/facebook/create-react-app/blob/master/packages/react-dev-utils/webpackHotDevClient.js#L59-L69

[LannyBose]

For folks Googling their way here looking for answers, this hack proposed a few years ago still works (from #1240):

devServer: {
  public: '0.0.0.0:0',
  host: '0.0.0.0',
  disableHostCheck: true
},

…to get the client to fallback to window.location.

[alexander-akait]

@lperiodbose thanks, let’s close in favor https://github.com/webpack/webpack-dev-server/issues/1240, try to find time on it for v4