How To Start a Development Server for Your Project

Starting a development server for your project can be a bit tricky, especially if you're using a build tool like Webpack. In this blog post, we'll go through the process of starting a development server using the npm run command and the --host flag.

The npm run command is used to run scripts defined in the project's package. Json file. These scripts can be used for tasks such as building, testing, and starting development servers. The --host flag is an optional argument that can be passed to a script, it allows you to specify the hostname or IP address that the development server should bind to.

In the package. Json file of your project, you should have a script called dev that starts the development server. The script might look something like this:

"scripts": {
  "dev": "webpack-dev-server --config webpack.dev.js"
}

To start the development server, you would use the following command:

npm run dev

This will start the development server and it will be accessible on http://localhost:8080 by default.

If you want to start the development server and bind it to a specific IP address or hostname, you can use the --host flag. For example, if you want to start the development server and bind it to the IP address 127.0.0.1, you would use the following command:

npm run dev -- --host=127.0.0.1

This will start the development server and it will be accessible only on the localhost, i.e, it can only be accessed from the machine on which it is running.

It's also possible to specify a different port using the --port flag, like this:

npm run dev -- --port=3000

This will start the development server on port 3000 instead of the default 8080.

In case you are using a different build tool, the syntax for starting the development server might be different. However, the concept of passing arguments to scripts using the npm run command is the same.

That's it! You should now have a development server running and bound to the IP address or hostname of your choice. Keep in mind that this is just a basic example, and you can customize and add more functionality to your development server as per your requirements.

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