Is this alive in 2025?

[lkraav]

#234 was locked for collab, but researching how to move out of a koa-webpack setup to something webpack@5 is somewhat unclear, even with a bunch of AI discussion.

shellscape/koa-webpack#134 (comment) points to webpack-plugin-serve, but it seems this repo hasn't received a touch in 3 years.

Has everybody moved on to something else?

My use case is getting HMR for a React app SSR-d with Koa.

Documentation here suggests launching webpack at

webpack-plugin-serve/README.md

Lines 82 to 89 in b19fce1

	And run `webpack`:
	```console
	$ npx wp
	...
	⬡ wps: Server Listening on: http://[::]:55555
	...
	```

but AFAICT I want to continue to launch our nodemon setup like

{
  "scripts": {
    "development": "nodemon --watch src/server --watch src/client/webpack.dev.config.js src/server/app.js"
  }
}

Should I just aim for Vite, or native webpack@5 tooling in 2025? 🙏

[shellscape]

This project still has around 15k weekly downloads, so it's still alive, but mostly I'd wager for people still on webpack v4.

There's very little reason to use webpack in 2025. Even webpack v5 is considered tech debt where I've worked for the last few years - and they're right. Use vite.

[lkraav]

From shellscape/koa-webpack#134 (comment)

Integration with koa isn't something that's really needed anymore. If you take a look at the source in this package, you'll see that it's basically a fancy wrapper around webpack-dev-middleware, with some extra sauce for HMR. Using that as koa middleware is totally unnecessary these days. Take a look at https://github.com/shellscape/webpack-plugin-serve, which is a dev server using the successor components to everything that koa-webpack uses. It's less complicated, has fewer moving parts, and just as easy to turn on and off as koa middleware. I've used that plugin with every koa project I've worked on in the last two years, and haven't used koa-webpack myself since.

So a couple of years later.. we got ourselves updated away from Node 16 and koa-webpack.

For glorious benefit of others stumbling upon such, this is the minimum webpack-(dev|hot)-middleware Express adapter an LLM came up with:

const webpack = require('webpack');
const devMiddleware = require('webpack-dev-middleware');
const hotMiddleware = require('webpack-hot-middleware');

/**
 * Adapt Express-style middleware for Koa.
 *
 * @param {Function} middleware - Express middleware (req, res, next).
 * @returns {Function} Koa middleware (ctx, next).
 */
const adaptMiddleware = (middleware) => async (ctx, next) => {
  await new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
    middleware(ctx.req, ctx.res, (err) => (err ? reject(err) : resolve()));
  });
  if (!ctx.res.headersSent) await next();
};

/**
 * Creates Koa middleware for webpack dev server with HMR support.
 *
 * @param {Object} webpackConfig - Webpack configuration object.
 * @returns {Function} Koa middleware.
 */
module.exports = (webpackConfig) => {
  const compiler = webpack(webpackConfig);

  const dev = adaptMiddleware(
    devMiddleware(compiler, {
      publicPath: webpackConfig.output.publicPath,
    }),
  );

  const hot = adaptMiddleware(hotMiddleware(compiler));

  return async (ctx, next) => {
    ctx.res.locals = ctx.state;
    await dev(ctx, async () => {
      await hot(ctx, next);
    });
  };
};

From Webpack 5 now, we'll be considering taking further steps towards Vite or potentially rspack.