webpack-dev-server breaks on changing folder structure or renaming files and requires restart

Do you want to request a feature or report a bug? In my opinion this is a bug because it was working in older versions of webpack.

What is the current behavior? When I rename some file or change folder structure the webpack starts showing “…Module build failed: Error: ENOENT: no such file or directory,…”, and it doesn’t recover from that, so I have to restart webpack dev server in order to have the hot reloading working again. The documentation suggests explicitly setting watchOptions but didn’t work. Is there some cache invalidation that I have to configure or…? If the current behavior is a bug, please provide the steps to reproduce. Described above and my webpack dev configuration is:

const path = require('path');
const webpack = require('webpack');
const config = require('../config');

module.exports = {
  entry: [
    'react-hot-loader/patch',
    'webpack-dev-server/client?http://localhost:9001',
    'webpack/hot/only-dev-server',
    path.join(config.projectPath, 'src', 'reactApp'),
  ],
  output: {
    path: path.join(config.projectPath, 'assets'),
    filename: 'bundle.js',
    publicPath: 'http://localhost:9001/',
  },
  devtool: 'cheap-module-eval-source-map',
  plugins: [
    new webpack.HotModuleReplacementPlugin(),
    new webpack.NamedModulesPlugin(),
    new webpack.DefinePlugin({
      __DEV__: true,
      'process.env.NODE_ENV': JSON.stringify('development'),
    }),
    new webpack.ProvidePlugin({ Promise: 'bluebird' }),
  ],
  resolve: {
    extensions: ['.js', '.jsx'],
  },
  module: {
    noParse: /node_modules\/aws-sdk\/dist\/aws-sdk/,
    rules: [...],
  },
};

And my server.js file:

const devServer = new WebpackDevServer(webpack(webpackConfig), {
  hot: true,
  watchOptions: { poll: true },
  host: 'localhost',
  port: 9001,
  publicPath: 'http://localhost:9001/',
  compress: true,
  noInfo: true,
  stats: { colors: true, errorDetails: true },
  headers: { 'Access-Control-Allow-Origin': '*' },
  historyApiFallback: true,
});

devServer.listen(9001);

What is the expected behavior? Like in older versions of webpack, the dev-server should not crash, but pick up the new folder structure. If this is a feature request, what is motivation or use case for changing the behavior? having to manually restart dev server on any file structure change and wait for it to build a bundle is not useful at all. Please mention other relevant information such as the browser version, Node.js version, webpack version and Operating System. I’m using webpack 3.3.0 and webpack-dev-server 2.6.1, latest Chrome browser and Ubuntu 14.04.

[sokra]

This will be fixed in webpack 5

[palnes]

It really would be nice if it was possible to restart the build from scratch without exiting the watcher (think Ctrl-F5 for the watcher). Bonus points if it can re-parse the config it was started with as well. 🥇