Recently I had an issue whereby running webpack-dev-server --content-base www from the command line was working great, but as soon as I tried to automate it as a gulp task my bundle seemed to never reload properly.

new WebpackDevServer(webpack(webpackConfig), { 
    contentBase: "www" 
}).listen(8080, 'localhost', noop);

Functionally I had assumed that this would be equivalent to the previous command line version. I could see the server was correctly detecting changes and reloading the page but the content never changed.

A quick look at the cli bin revealed that the cli automatically sets the publicPath option based on the webpack config output.publicPath option.

options.publicPath = wpOpt.output && wpOpt.output.publicPath || "";

So I just had to manually add this option to the webpack-dev-server config.

This copying of the webpack publicPath seems like a sensible default to me, which begs the question, why isn’t this the default for the API?