I’m using WSL on Windows for almost all my programming projects. The other day, I wanted to work on a React project again I hadn’t spent time on for a while.
I had created the project with create-react-app initially. I checked out the source code, ran npm install
, npm start
and started to write code.
To my surprise, whenever I made changes to a file, the changes weren’t reflected in the browser. Somehow Webpack didn’t recognize the file changes.
After some research I found out, that I needed to apply a few more settings to make it work again.
Polling
Step 1 was to switch Webpack’s change watcher into polling mode. For that, create a .env
file in the project root and add:
CHOCKIDAR_USE_POLLING=true
That already helped a bit, yet still it took a long time from making a change to seeing the results.
Allow more Watchers
What also helped is to increase the number of maximum watchers on the system.
Run the following snippet:
$ echo fs.inotify.max_user_watches=524288 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p
Source: Webpack