This is because you both are including the dashboard plugin in production. Putting a flag around it so it only gets added in dev, or splitting your config files into dev and prod should fix it.

Yes, but is there a reason for plugin to “hang” the process?

This makes it somewhat more difficult to keep configurations intact - you cannot call webpack with webpack-dashboard if plugin is not enabled and if you do enable it, it will hang the process even if it’s called without webpack-dashboard.

Could it maybe look at the child process? As webpack exits after job is done and webpack-dev-server does not - just like webpack-dashboard should when running one or another.

Furthermore, you cannot run webpack in development environment this way .

I’ve proposed a fix for this in #215. In the meantime, here is a workaround:

// webpack.config.js
const DashboardPlugin = require('webpack-dashboard/plugin');

const devConfig = {
  // rest of config as usual...
  plugins: [
    {
      apply: function() {
        const dashboard = new DashboardPlugin({color: 'cyan'});
        dashboard.apply.apply(dashboard, arguments);
      }
    }
  ]
};

👍 Seems wrong to hang when invoking webpack without webpack-dashboard.

@fancyfootowork’s yargs solution worked for me.

I ran into the same error. I ended up adding yargs. Seems to do the trick. In webpack.config.js:

const argv = require('yargs').argv;

then after setting up the main config:

if (argv.watch) {
  const DashboardPlugin = require('webpack-dashboard/plugin');
  config = merge(config, { plugins: [new DashboardPlugin()] });
}

(to use merge just include that at the top of your webpack.config.js)

const merge = require('webpack-merge');