internal-ip.md

🍲 Using an Internal IP Address

When on systems or setups which limit use of localhost, or in scenarios where the server should listen on the address of the internet-facing interface, the host can be set dynamically. We're going to use the internal-ip module to demonstrate how to set that up with webpack-plugin-serve.

Meat and Potatoes

To get started, your webpack configuration should already be setup and building successfully without using webpack-plugin-serve. Next, let's get the plugin setup:

const internalIp = require('internal-ip');
const { WebpackPluginServe: Serve } = require('webpack-plugin-serve');

module.exports = {
  ...,
  plugins: [new Serve({
    host: internalIp.v4()
  })],
  ...
};

Pretty straight-forward, right? Now, there's lots of magic going on here that users don't need to futz with; the big take-away here is that the host option accepts a Promise as a value, and internalIp.v4() returns a Promise. Nothing more there to do! Bueno. Bien. Gut. 好.

Note: It's worth checking out the docs for internal-ip. You'll find that it also supports getting the IPv6 address if you'd rather use that.

🍰 Dessert

And there you have it. We have a sample app that will load the IP of the local machine and use that as the server's host. Cheers, and good eating.