This repo contains two npm modules: a dependency and an app which consumes that dependency via a yarn link dependency (which becomes a symlink in the node_modules folder). The app is configured to be served with webpack-dev-server. The expectation is that changes in the dependency will be detected when webpack-dev-server is running and that the page will refresh with the new content. The actuality is that this does not happen and even a manual refresh does not pick up the new content – only a restart of webpack-dev-server does.

Notice that the webpack configuration has resolve.symlinks set to false. This appears to be a necessary condition for this bug. If that line is removed or the value changed to true, the reloading works as expected. It is my understanding however that setting resolve.symlinks to false is a valid thing to do which should not cause this behavior. In the non-proof-of-concept application where this issue was discovered, resolve.symlinks needs to be disabled in order to prevent multiples copies of react from being included into the bundle.

Run yarn install in both the dep and app directories. Then run yarn start in the app directory. The application can then be accessed at http://localhost:4043/