Ran into a wall getting hot module reload (HMR as it is called) set up on local WordPress development with bitnami. Actually I was able to get the hot reload working but couldn’t get it the conditional IF statement portion working easily because bitnami doesn’t have a yourlocalsite.local domain name to plug into the conditional part of IF statement. After hacking a round a bit with no success I decided to test on the local (local by flywheel) development environment.

After digging into the issue a little bit and downloading local by flywheel, I realized this HMR ended up being quite the rabbit hole, albeit a necessary one, as webpack is a critical development skill to learn, (it’s up there with Git). And now that you have a bundler the rabbithole expands even further, (SASS, cache busting, essentially all the packages your heart can imagine SASS, cache busting, etc).

There’s a good article on HMR here

Another one by Carrie Forde here