How to debug Angular CLI dev server

Question

When running ng serve from the Angular CLI in development, I expect for my application to be served at a local URL with live reloading. Typically, after running ng serve and loading my app in the browser, the console shows a single [WDS] Live Reloading enabled. log entry.

The problem:

Recently the [WDS] Live Reloading enabled. log message has started being printed to the console 4 times, and evidence seems to suggest that 4 seperate processes are listening to my app's file changes. This is causing a slowdown on page reloading and some other strange activity. I am also seeing the following messages printed in my terminal during initial compilation of my app (immediately after running ng serve), which I don't remember ever seeing before.

• ｢wds｣: webpack output is served from /
• ｢wds｣: 404s will fallback to //index.html

None of this is preventing my app from being served locally, but it does seem to be causing a general slowdown in development.

What might be causing this? The Angular CLI is generally a "batteries included" tool, and I'm unsure how to go about debugging this problem (short of reverting a bunch of changes and walking forward slowly--which I'd rather not have to do). Any debugging tips / insight / or suggestions are appreciated!

Answer 1

I was able to fix this issue by upgrading my app to Angular v8. As part of the upgrade, I was able to see that neither my app's angular.json or tsconfig.json files were modified. Given that the upgrade did fix the issue, the issue must have been caused by a dependency. Upgrading to Angular v8 changed a lot of dependencies, including moving from node v8 to node v10, so I'm unsure what exactly fixed things. My best guess is that two or more angular development dependencies expected to find different versions of each other (but again, this is just a guess).

I realize this is a rather unsatisfactory answer, and I'm lucky that my external dependencies support Angular v8 at this point.

If someone else comes along with a better, more generalized answer / solution, I'll happily mark that answer as correct.

Answer 2

several instances may have been running. did you quit the process with ctrl+z? you should quit with ctrl+c. you could also try restarting your computer.