webpack-dev-server: Wrong protocol for socket url's in a local environment

• Operating System: Mac OS Sierra 10.12.6
• Node Version: 6.5.0
• NPM Version: 3.10.3
• webpack Version: 3.8.1
• webpack-dev-server Version: 2.9.4

• This is a bug
• This is a feature request
• This is a modification request

Code

Relevant webpack setting:

devServer: {
  disableHostCheck: true,
 },   

Expected Behavior

When running a webpack dev server on localhost in a development environment, I need the protocol for socket messages to be http, not https even if the location.protocol from the browser is https. In my usecase, an Nginx proxy resolves https requests for a particular host (https://my-domain.com) to the appropriate services (http://localhost:3000, http://localhost:3012, etc). I would then expect socket requests to be http://localhost:3012/sockjs-node/info?t=1510792203948 not https://localhost:3012/sockjs-node/info?t=1510792203948. Note the former is http and the latter is https. The expected behavior for the protocol is ‘http’ in my usecase.

Actual Behavior

In webpack-dev-server, the browser’s protocol, if available, takes precedence over the local protocol. This causes webpack features relying on sockets such as hot module reloading to fail in my environment.

For Bugs; How can we reproduce the behavior?

For Features; What is the motivation and/or use-case for the feature?

I would like to figure out some clean way of setting the protocol to http without necessarily breaking the “security by default” approach that is currently implemented. Is there a way I could solve this without having to shepard PR requests down the food chain (webpack-dev-server --> webpack --> nwb).

The relevant code is client/index.js, line 188 - 190:

if (hostname && (self.location.protocol === 'https:' || urlParts.hostname === '0.0.0.0')) {
  protocol = self.location.protocol;
}

If I submitted a pull request with something like:

if (hostname && (self.location.protocol === 'https:' || urlParts.hostname === '0.0.0.0')) {
  protocol = self.location.protocol;
} else if (hostname) {
  protocol = 'http';
}

is that probably going to break other people’s setups? If so, do we take more of a configuration approach where I could set a string? Something like devServer.protocol = ‘http’ in webpack settings.