neutrinojs build works but start does not write any changes

Question

I'm trying to setup neutrino for my web project. Configuring it seems really easy and straightforward, however I can't get watch mode (start) to work at all and I have no idea why...

For testing I have a clean, test-only setup for neutrinojs 8.3.0 with minimal config and one simple index.js file in the /src folder. If I run yarn build it works well, files are generated to the /build directory as excepted (index, runtime, manifest), no errors.

But if I run yarn start, and change something in index.js, I can see the Source changed, re-compiling message in terminal then √ Build completed but none of the files in /build were changed, hashes are the same they was before.

If I delete everything from /build and run yarn start again, it says again that √ Build completed but the /build dir is empty, no files generated.

I can't understand, it should just work. Did I miss something? Or is it a bug in neutrino or webpack 3.12.0? Should I create an issue?

I'm using VS Code which is not using "safe-write" so that's not an issue here... I've tried it on windows and linux, same for both.

src/index.js:

console.log('hello world');

.neutrinorc.js:

module.exports = {
    use: [
        ['@neutrinojs/web', {
            html: false
        }]
    ]
};

package.json:

{
  "name": "neutrino",
  "version": "1.0.0",
  "main": "src/index.js",
  "license": "MIT",
  "scripts": {
    "start": "neutrino start",
    "build": "neutrino build"
  },
  "devDependencies": {
    "@neutrinojs/web": "^8.3.0",
    "neutrino": "^8.3.0"
  }
}

Answer 1

I can't understand, it should just work. Did I miss something? Or is it a bug in neutrino or webpack 3.12.0? Should I create an issue?

Neutrino under the hood uses webpack-dev-server which uses webpack-dev-middleware and as you can see on the first section of the READMEfile:

No files are written to disk, rather it handles files in memory

That is what is happening. Files are written into memory and webpack is able to serve them. That is why you can see your application.