title: Running a node express server using webpack-dev-server
body: <p>I'm using webpack to run my react frontend successfully using the following config:</p>
  
  <pre><code>{
      name: 'client',
      entry: './scripts/main.js',
      output: {
          path: __dirname,
          filename: 'bundle.js'  
      },
      module: {
          loaders: [
              {
                  test: /.jsx?$/,
                  loader: 'babel-loader',
                  exclude: /node_modules/,
                  query:{
                      presets: ['es2015', 'react', 'stage-2']
                  }
              }
          ]
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm trying to put up a node.js express backend as well, and would like to run that through webpack as well, so that I have a single server running both the backend and frontend, and because I want to use babel to  transpile my javascript.</p>
  
  <p>I made a quick testserver looking like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>var express = require('express');
  console.log('test');
  
  var app = express();
  
  app.get('/', function(req, res){
      res.send("Hello world from Express!!");
  });
  
  app.listen(3000, function(){
      console.log('Example app listening on port 3000');
  });
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If I run this with <code>node index.js</code> and open my browser on <code>localhost:3000</code> it prints "Hello world from Express!!". So far so good. Then I tried creating a web-pack config for it:</p>
  
  <pre><code>var fs = require('fs');
  var nodeModules = {};
  fs.readdirSync('node_modules')
      .filter(function(x) {
          return ['.bin'].indexOf(x) === -1;
      })
      .forEach(function(mod) {
          nodeModules[mod] = 'commonjs ' + mod;    
  });
  
  module.exports = [
  {
      name: 'server',
      target: 'node',
      entry: './index.js',
      output: {
          path: __dirname,
          filename: 'bundle.js'
      },
      externals: nodeModules,
      module: {
          loaders: [
              { 
                  test: /\.js$/,
                  loaders: [
                      'babel-loader'
                  ]
              },
              {
                  test:  /\.json$/, 
                  loader: 'json-loader'
              }
          ]
      }
  }   
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>When I run the command <code>webpack-dev-server</code> it starts up successfully (it seems). However, if I go to my browser on <code>localhost:3000</code> now, it just says that the webpage is not available, just as when the server is not running at all.</p>
  
  <p>I'm very new to both node and webpack, so either I have made a small mistake somewhere, or I'm way off ;)</p>