Server#

Rsbuild comes with a built-in dev server designed to improve the development experience. When you run the rsbuild dev or rsbuild preview commands, the server will start, providing features such as page preview, routing, and hot module reloading.

Page Routing#

Rsbuild Server offers a set of default routing convention, and allows users to customize it through configurations.

Default Behavior#

Rsbuild Server will generate the corresponding page route based on the source.entry configuration.

When entry is index, the page can be accessed through /; when entry is foo, the page can be accessed through /foo.

export default {
  source: {
    entry: {
      index: './src/index.ts',
      foo: './src/pages/foo/index.ts',
    },
  },
};

Fallback Behavior#

By default, when the request meets the following conditions and the corresponding resource is not found, it will fallback to index.html:

• The request is a GET or HEAD request
• Which accepts text/html (the request header accept type is text/html or */*)

export default {
  server: {
    htmlFallback: 'index',
  },
};

Custom Fallback Behavior#

When Rsbuild's default server.htmlFallback configuration cannot meet your needs, for example, if you want to be able to access main.html when accessing /, you can set it up using server.historyApiFallback.

export default {
  source: {
    entry: {
      main: './src/index.ts',
    },
  },
  server: {
    htmlFallback: false,
    historyApiFallback: {
      index: '/main.html',
    },
  },
};

HTML Output Path#

Normally, / points to the dist root directory, and the HTML file is output to the dist root directory. At this time, the corresponding HTML page can be accessed through /some-path.

If you output HTML files to other subdirectories by modifying output.distPath.html, you need to access the corresponding HTML page through /[htmlPath]/some-path.

For example, if you set the HTML file to be output to the HTML directory, index.html will be accessed through /html/, and foo.html will be accessed through /html/foo.

export default {
  source: {
    entry: {
      index: './src/index.ts',
      foo: './src/pages/foo/index.ts',
    },
  },
  output: {
    distPath: {
      html: 'html',
    },
  },
};

Comparing Rspack Dev Server#

Rsbuild dev server and the dev server of Rspack CLI (@rspack/dev-server) share some similarities and differences:

• Both are based on webpack-dev-middleware.
• They have different configs, with Rsbuild offering a richer set of configurations.
• The log format of Rspack CLI aligns with Webpack CLI, while the logs of Rsbuild are clearer and more readable.

Extend middleware#

Rsbuild server does not use any Node.js frameworks, and the req and res provided by Rsbuild middleware are both native Node.js objects.

This means that when you migrate from other server-side frameworks (such as Express), the original middleware may not necessarily be used directly in Rsbuild. For example, the req.params,req.path, req.search, req.query and other properties provided by Express cannot be accessed in the Rsbuild middleware.

If you need to use existing middleware in Rsbuild, this can be done by passing the server application as middleware as follows:

import expressMiddleware from 'my-express-middleware';
import express from 'express';

// Initialize Express app
const app = express();

app.use(expressMiddleware);

export default {
  dev: {
    setupMiddlewares: [
      (middleware) => {
        middleware.unshift(app);
      },
    ],
  },
};

Custom Server#

If you want to integrate Rsbuild dev server into a custom server, you can get the instance methods of Rsbuild dev server through the createDevServer method of Rsbuild and call them on demand.

For details, please refer to Rsbuild - createDevServer.