[Klathmon]

Express (and probably others) are for the build system. It's used to serve the development mode application locally during development.

That's (part of the reason) why they are installed under devDependencies.

[DiThi]

I see, it has a "dev-server.js". Why is that not a package? We have super simple functionality like "left pad" but not complex dev servers as a package? What if it breaks? Do I need to update the template?

[sciolistse]

There are dev server packages for webpack (https://webpack.github.io/docs/webpack-dev-server.html). I can't tell you why it's not used in this specific project.

[andrew_]

It should be noted that those are the "old and busted" docs. https://webpack.js.org/configuration/dev-server/#devserver is the place to visit these days.

[sciolistse]

my bad, i make that mistake all the time. doesn't help that searching for webpack documentation always turns up the bad results first!

Thanks for the correction.

[Klathmon]

If you use Google, there are plugins which can hide certain domains from search results.

I use to hide the old docs domain.

[andrew_]

I can promise you that decommissioning that old site is on our radar

[Klathmon]

They do have packages for that, several, but they all don't work in all cases.

Some tend to be fairly custom, so they do it themselves. Ours for example serves several apps in the same repo, with both HTTPS and HTTP, including some hot reload middleware and integration with our CDN for some live assets in development.

As for "why we have left-pad but not this", anyone can make a package. If you want to make a `uselessjs` package that does literally nothing, you can.