How to build JS in a separate process without rails/webpack fighting?

[BenSturmfels]

The docs/getting_started.md advises building JS in a separate webpack --watch process during development. When I do this though, rails server continues to also compile JS on the next request after changes to the JS code. How do you tell Rails not to also build the JS?

[wwahammy]

Generally, you wouldn't want to tell Rails not to build the Javascript in development. You can run bin/webpack to prebuild it though and, if none of the source files have changed, it probably would just pass the built assets through to the end-user.

The advice on using webpack --watch is out of date.

[BenSturmfels]

I've now updated the getting_started.md docs to mention bin/webpack-dev-server in #1051. I can confirm that there doesn't seem to be any double-building going when using this approach.